Donald Trump took aim at New Zealand during a speech today as he mocked the country's pandemic response following the latest Covid-19 outbreak in Auckland.
The US President stood on the tarmac in Mankato, Minnesota and compared how the virus has affected USA and New Zealand.
"I don't want that, I don't want that," he repeated, of New Zealand's community outbreak.
"They were holding up names of countries, and now they are saying 'whoops'.
"Even New Zealand, you see what is going on in New Zealand. They beat it, they beat it. It was like front page, they beat it because they wanted to show me something.
"The problem is [a] big surge in New Zealand. It's terrible. We don't want that."
Last week, the number of cases of Covid-19 in the United States passed the 5 million mark - the total population of New Zealand.
And its number of deaths is equivalent to the entire population of Hamilton.
There have now been 5.4 million cases of the virus in the US and 170,000 people have died, according to tracking data from Johns Hopkins University.
While the population of the US is far bigger – at 330,000,000 - the scale of the coronavirus crisis there is clear and Donald Trump’s administration has been widely criticised for its handling of the pandemic.
New Zealand has a total of 1,280 Covid-19 cases and 22 deaths, Ministry of Health figures show and experienced 100 days with no community transmission.
There are currently 78 cases of the virus in New Zealand, 58 of those linked to one cluster which has emerged in the community and the rest in managed isolation.
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