Coronavirus: Jacinda Ardern hits back as Trump says New Zealand has ‘big surge’

‘Anyone who is following will quite easily see New Zealand’s nine cases a day does not compare to the United States’ tens of thousands,’ she said
Auckland city was recently put back into lockdown after a new outbreak emerged last week

Coronavirus pandemic

Agence France-Presse

Published: 3:04pm, 18 Aug 2020

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New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Tuesday slapped down US President Donald Trump’s talk of an out-of-control coronavirus “surge” in New Zealand as “patently wrong”.

She expressed dismay after Trump exaggerated the new virus outbreak in New Zealand as a “big surge” that Americans would do well to avoid.

“Anyone who is following will quite easily see that New Zealand’s nine cases in a day does not compare to the United States’ tens of thousands,” she said.

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New Zealand hits back after Donald Trump claims the country has ‘terrible’ Covid-19 surge

“Obviously, it’s patently wrong,” she added of Trump’s remarks, in unusually blunt criticism from an American ally.

New Zealand had been hailed as a global success story after eradicating local transmission of the virus and Ardern was lauded as the “anti-Trump”.

But the recent discovery of a cluster in Auckland forced the country’s largest city back into lockdown.

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At an election rally in Minnesota on Monday, Trump jumped on that development as evidence his critics – who held up New Zealand as an example – were wrong.

“You see what is going on in New Zealand,” Trump told supporters. “They beat it; they beat it. It was like front page (news), they beat it because they wanted to show me something.”

Citing a “big surge in New Zealand”, Trump added: “It’s terrible. We don’t want that.”

New Zealand, with a population of five million, has recorded about 1,300 coronavirus cases across the country.

A supporter wears a mask of US President Donald Trump in Minnesota on August 17, 2020. Photo: AFP

The United States is the hardest-hit nation in the world with well over 5 million cases and more than 170,000 deaths.

It is not the first time that Trump and Ardern – a young, centre-left leader – have clashed.

Shortly after her stunning election win in 2017, Trump met her at a summit in Vietnam and joked she had “caused a lot of upset in her country”.

“No one marched when I was elected,” she responded, referring to the protests that followed Trump’s victory in 2016.

The normally busy central motorway interchange is deserted on the morning of August 14, 2020 as Auckland goes into lockdown. Photo: AFP

Both leaders are heading into elections in the coming weeks, and for both, trading barbs is likely to play well with supporters.

Ardern has been forced to postpone the elections by a month because of the latest outbreak, putting her sizeable lead in the polls at risk.

Trump is trailing Democrat Joe Biden in the US presidential polls and facing fierce criticism over his handling of the pandemic.

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Meanwhile, New Zealand on Tuesday said overseas students would have to wait until next year to enter the country, as neighbouring Australia is set to begin a pilot scheme to bring in 300 international students.

Australian Trade Minister Simon Birmingham said 300 students would be admitted on flights from Singapore to Adelaide starting next month, using spare quarantine capacity in Adelaide.

New Zealand educational institutions have been lobbying the government for months to let them run their own quarantine facilities for students at their own cost, arguing that foreign students would be motivated to obey the rules because breaking them would mean they would have to leave the country.

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Ardern told NewstalkZB that she would “look at what we can learn” from the Australian pilot scheme, but the government’s position was the border would remain shut to foreign students until 2021.

“We haven’t ruled out a system in the future where we manage potentially international students even if they are in separate bespoke quarantine facilities,” she said.

“We have said, though, that our focus should be on doing that in the new academic year rather than this one, given the work it would need to go into doing that properly.”

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