Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says Donald Trump’s claim New Zealand is experiencing a “surge” in Covid-19 cases is “patently wrong”.
“Obviously I don’t think there’s any comparison between New Zealand’s current cluster and the tens of thousands of cases that are being seen daily in the United States,” Ardern said today.
“Obviously, every country is experiencing its own fight with Covid-19; it is a tricky virus, but not one where I would compare New Zealand’s current status to the United States.”
Ardern said anyone who was following outbreaks around the world would “quite easily see” New Zealand’s nine new cases yesterday didn’t compare to the tens of thousands in the United States.
On Monday New Zealand reported nine new cases while the United States had 42,000.
“Obviously it’s patently wrong,” she said when asked about Trump’s comments.
“We are still one of the best-performing countries in the world when it comes to Covid and our workers are focused on keeping it that way.”
Trump made comments about the outbreak in New Zealand when he addressed a crowd in Mankato, Minnesota.
“You see what’s going on in New Zealand?” Trump said.
“They beat it they beat, it was like front page [news] they beat it because they wanted to show me something.”
“The problem is [there is a] big surge in New Zealand, you know it’s terrible – we don’t want that.
This is an invisible enemy, that should have never been let to come to this country, to Europe to the rest of the world by China, just remember it,” he said.
New Zealand now has 78 active cases of Covid-19 after a resurgence of infections in the community last week, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 1,280.
The US has recorded more than 5,420,000 Covid cases and more than 170,000 people have died from the virus.
