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18th Aug 2020

New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern hits back at “patently wrong” claims from Donald Trump

Alan Loughnane

covid new zealand

“Big surge in New Zealand, you know it’s terrible.”

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has hit out at US President Donald Trump for saying the country is experiencing a “big surge” in Covid-19, calling Trump’s remarks “patently wrong”.

Speaking at an event in Minnesota on Monday night, Trump said the “big surge” in New Zealand was “terrible.”

“The places they were using to hold up now they are having a big surge,” Trump said at the campaign rally. “They were holding up names of countries, and now they are saying, ‘Whoops!'”

“You see what’s going on in New Zealand?” he said.

“They beat it; they beat it, it was like front-page news because they wanted to show me something.”

He added: “Big surge in New Zealand, you know it’s terrible. We don’t want that.”

Speaking to reporters, Ardern said there was no comparison between the two countries with just a handful each day in New Zealand compared to “tens of thousand” in the US.

“I think anyone who’s following Covid and its transmission globally will quite easily see that New Zealand’s nine cases in a day does not compare to the United States’ tens of thousands, and in fact does not compare to most countries in the world,” she said.

She called his claims “patently wrong” and reiterated that New Zealand is one of the best performing countries in the world in regards to Covid-19.

New Zealand has had roughly 1,300 coronavirus cases since the pandemic began earlier this year and currently has around 70 cases.

A recent outbreak of the virus saw restrictions imposed on Auckland on Wednesday last week after a number of new infections were identified in the city.

There are four alert levels in New Zealand with Auckland currently on level three while the rest of the country remains on level two.

Prior to this recent outbreak, there had been no locally transmitted cases in the country in nearly four months and almost all lockdown restrictions had been lifted.

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