Donald Trump claimed this week that New Zealand was an example of a country that had early success in fighting the outbreak and now is struggling with a “big surge.” New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Arden was quick to put a stop to that bit of Trumpian fantasy. “Obviously it’s patently wrong,” Ardern said, noting that anyone following the course of the coronavirus would easily see a big difference in how the two countries handle the pandemic.

“We are still one of the best-performing countries in the world when it comes to COVID,” Ardern said on Tuesday. “Our workers are focused on keeping it that way.”

On the same day that New Zealand reported nine new cases, and the US added nearly 42,000, Trump, speaking to supporters at an airport in Minnesota, said, “The 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!’ ” Trump said.

“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, ‘They beat it,’ because they wanted to show me something,” Trump said. “The problem is, big surge in New Zealand. So, you know, it’s terrible.”

“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,” Ardern said.

In the US, more than 170,000 people have died out of a population of around 330 million. New Zealand currently has 22 COVID deaths out of a population of approximately 5 million people, so even at approximately 1.5 percent of the population of the US – they have clearly managed the pandemic better than many other countries.

New Zealand has 90 active coronavirus cases, driven by a cluster of new cases in Auckland. Only six of those patients are currently in the hospital. Until last week, the country had gone more than 100 days without any community transmission of the coronavirus. In that same period the US had more than 1.7 million new cases and over 29,700 deaths.