TORONTO -- In an apparent backlash to remarks made by U.S. President Donald Trump about their country experiencing a “big surge” in coronavirus cases, New Zealanders have taken to Twitter to share photos of their scenic surroundings with the tongue-in-cheek hashtag #NZHellhole.
Since mid-August, the American president has repeatedly pointed to a small uptick in cases in New Zealand as an indication that even countries that have been praised for their response to the pandemic are struggling to contain the virus.
“The places they were using to hold up, now they’re having a big surge,” Trump said at an airport rally in Mankato, Minn. on Aug. 17. “They were holding up names of countries and now they’re saying ‘whoops!’ Even New Zealand, do you see what’s happening in New Zealand? They beat it, they beat it, it was like front-page [news]… The problem is [there’s a] big surge in New Zealand. It’s terrible. We don’t want that.”
On that day, New Zealand recorded nine new cases of COVID-19 while the U.S. reported nearly 42,000 new cases.
Later that week, Trump brought up the Pacific island nation once again during a White House press conference when he said New Zealand was experiencing a “big outbreak” of the virus.
“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,” he said.
In response to the American president’s comments, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called the two countries’ situations “not comparable” because only 22 people had died of COVID-19 by that time, while the U.S. had more than 170,000 deaths.
Even though New Zealand had experienced a small cluster of new cases in the city of Auckland, Arden dismissed Trump’s description of the increase as a “big surge” as “patently wrong.”
“Obviously, 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,” she said during a press conference. “New Zealand's nine cases in a day does not compare to the United States’ tens of thousands.”
New Zealand’s prime minister wasn’t the only one who responded to Trump’s remarks about the country’s handling of the disease.
In the month since he began talking about New Zealand’s “surge” in cases, the mocking hashtag #NZHellhole has regularly made an appearance on Twitter’s list of top-trending content.
New Zealanders using the popular hashtag shared photos of their country’s beautiful beaches and peaceful countryside with sarcastic captions about how awful it is to live there under pandemic restrictions.
With files from CNN
