Trump Blasts New Zealand's COVID "Surge" of 9 Cases as U.S. Records More Than 40,000 Yesterday

President Trump must be a terrible card player because he always plays a weak hand.

During a campaign stop yesterday in Minnesota, Trump blasted New Zealand's "surge" of COVID cases:

“The places they were using to hold up now they’re having a big surge … they were holding up names of countries and now they’re saying ‘whoops!.

“Do you see what’s happening in New Zealand? They beat it, they beat it, it was like front-page news because they wanted to show me something,”

“Big surge in New Zealand, 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 Europe and the rest of the world by China.” 

The "big surge" in New Zealand was a grand total of 9 cases yesterday. After going 102 days without recording a single new case, there have been 90 new cases over the past week which has prompted a resumption of lockdown measures the most stringent of which are in Auckland where the cluster has occurred. This has resulted in a four week delay of national elections which were to be held next month. Meanwhile, the United States had more than 40,000 new COVID-19 cases yesterday as we will soon reach 5.5 million cases overall. 

For her part, New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern called Trump's comments "patently wrong" while Deputy PM Winston Peters noted, “The American people can work out that what we have for a whole day, they have every 22 seconds of the day. That speaks for itself.” 

As of this writing, New Zealand has 1,643 COVID-19 cases with 22 deaths. Meanwhile, the United States has now surpassed 170,000 COVID-19 deaths. With slightly more than 5 million people, New Zealand's population is roughly that of both Alabama and South Carolina. Yet Alabama has recorded more than 105,000 COVID-19 cases with 1,867 deaths while South Carolina also has more than 105,000 cases with 2,185 deaths. Not only do Alabama and South Carolina have more than six times as many cases as New Zealand, but have more deaths than New Zealand has cases.

But by all means, let President Trump continue to bring up New Zealand. Let him keep playing a weak hand. The more he speaks about New Zealand the more Americans will wish we were there. Since that option isn't available to us for the foreseeable future, I think we'll settle for electing Joe Biden our next President.