President Donald Trump makes headlines once again after calling out New Zealand for its latest nine COVID-19 cases.
Donald Trump made a presidential campaign stop in Mankato, Minnesota, on Monday. In his speech, the current POTUS addressed how other countries were battling the COVID-19 pandemic.
Among all the countries worth mentioning, Trump took New Zealand as an example, and highlighted the “big surge” the country was facing after recording nine new cases following over 100 days of being coronavirus-free.
Donald Trump on New Zealand’s new COVID-19 cases
President Trump has faced so much criticism in how he handled the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. During his campaign stopover in Minnesota, he mentioned how other countries that once were “hailed as a success story” are now experiencing a “big surge.”
He was quoted, saying:
“Places that they were using to hold up, they’re having a big surge, and I don’t want that, I don’t want that, but they were holding up names of countries.
and now they’re saying ‘whoops!’ “
He then mentions New Zealand, which had been praised for months now after its government implementations led to one of the first few countries to beat out the pandemic. On the same day of Trump’s campaign stop, there were nine new cases recorded in New Zealand, per reports.
Donald Trump went on with his speech, expressing:
“In fact, even New Zealand, do you see what’s going on in New Zealand? They beat it, they beat it, it was like front page news because they wanted to show me something. The problem is big surge in New Zealand.
SO YOU KNOW, IT’S TERRIBLE. WE DON’T WANT THAT. but this is an invisible enemy that should never have been let to come to this country, to Europe or the rest of the world by China. Just remember that.”
Reports have it that the nine new cases in NZ were recorded on Monday, and the following day, there were 13 more. Meanwhile, the United States recorded 41,893 new cases on Monday, per the CDC data.
NZ Prime Minister addressed Trump’s comment
The COVID-19 new cases comment from Donald Trump has reached Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. She answered the reporters by commenting on Tuesday, as quoted by Newshub:
“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.
“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 went on to say that anyone who has been following the global transmission of COVID-19 would “quite easily see” that NZ’s nine cases are not comparable to that of the U.S. cases which come in tens of thousands.
Nevertheless, the Prime Minister is not at all concerned about Trump’s statement misrepresenting the real status of her country in terms of battling out the coronavirus.
Featured image courtesy of Evan El-Amin/Shutterstock