New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made a pointed comparison between New Zealand’s coronavirus situation and the epidemic in the United States today, two days after US President Donald Trump said the island nation had a “big outbreak.”
There were 11 new coronavirus cases reported in New Zealand on Friday, Ardern said, adding that the country has “one of the lowest death rates,” from the virus, especially compared to the US.
“New Zealand is among a small number of countries that still has a low rate of Covid cases, and one of the lowest Covid deaths rates in the world,” Ardern said in a news conference.
“To give you just one example, the United States has 16,563 cases per million, we have 269 per million people.”
New Zealand is currently grappling with a reemergence of cases, which came shortly after the country went more than 100 days with no local transmissions.
Ardern’s comparison comes after Trump made comments disparaging New Zealand at a White House news conference on Wednesday.
“New Zealand, by the way, had a big outbreak,” Trump said. “And other countries that were held up to try and make us look not as good as we should look — because we’ve done an incredible job — but they’re having a lot of outbreaks.”
Tracing an outbreak: Of the 11 new cases reported on Friday, nine were locally transmitted and two were imported from overseas, New Zealand’s Director-General of Health Dr. Ashley Bloomfield said.
He added that five of the local cases are linked to churches in South Auckland, and four are related to household contacts of previous cases. The new infections bring New Zealand’s total number of recorded cases to 1,315.
As of Friday, 88 of 89 active community cases have been traced back to a cluster identified in Auckland last week, while one case remains under investigation, Bloomfield said.
“We may not find all the answers for this cluster,” Ardern warned, adding that the origins of the outbreak were still under investigation by health officials.
Some 15,714 coronavirus tests were conducted on Thursday, bringing the total number of tests taken in the country to 673,220, Bloomfield said.