New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Tuesday called “manifestly false” a statement by US President Donald Trump who spoke of an uncontrolled “huge rise” in coronavirus cases in the archipelago.
• Read also: All the developments of the pandemic
Ms Ardern expressed dismay after the US president overstated the current scale of the Covid-19 epidemic in New Zealand, calling it a “huge rise” that Americans would do better to avoid.
“Anyone who follows” the situation “will see quite easily that nine cases in one day in New Zealand are not comparable to the tens of thousands recorded in the United States,” Ms. Ardern replied.
“This is manifestly false,” added the Prime Minister in a particularly severe and rare reaction against her American ally.
New Zealand had been praised for its strong and effective response to the outbreak of the pandemic and Ms Arden had been praised as “the anti-Trump”.
Last week, the return of the pandemic to the country after a remarkable 102-day streak without local contamination, forced authorities to order the containment of Auckland, the country’s first city.
At an election rally in Minnesota on Monday, Mr. Trump used these recent developments to prove to his critics, who had cited New Zealand as an example, that they were wrong.
Speaking of a “huge increase” in the number of cases in New Zealand, he said: “It’s terrible. We don’t want that ”.
New Zealand, with a population of 5 million, has recorded 1,300 cases of the coronavirus since the start of the epidemic about eight months ago and around 70 cases are currently active.
For its part, the United States is the most affected country in the world with more than five million cases and 170,000 deaths.
This is not the first time that these two leaders have confronted each other verbally.
So, shortly after his 2016 presidential victory, Mr. Trump met Ms. Ardern at a summit in Vietnam.
He joked that she had “caused a lot of upheaval in his country”.
“You know, no one marched when I was elected,” she retorted, referring to the protests that followed Mr. Trump’s election.
The mandates of these two leaders are called into play in the coming months and this type of verbal exchange makes their supporters happy.
On Monday, the New Zealand Prime Minister, although leading in the polls, postponed the election until October due to the virus.
In the United States, Mr. Trump is barely in the polls within three months of the November 3 presidential election.