Trump: New Zealand Is Seeing "A Big Surge, A Massive Breakout" In Virus Cases. In The Last Week, NZ Had 56 New Cases (The US Had 262,994.)

Donald Trump has mentioned at least three times in the last week how badly New Zealand, a country previously held up as a model for fighting SARS-CoV-2, a country that was portrayed as the opposite of the United States, has been hit by a surge of new cases.

Trump is gloating because he had been compared unfavourably to Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand (a woman!), but now he says the virus tables have turned, so to speak. Maybe New Zealand isn't better than the US and Trump after all.

August 17:

Now all of a sudden a lot of 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." In fact, even New Zealand, 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. The problem is, big surge in New Zealand. So you know, it's terrible.

August 19:

New Zealand, by the way, had a big outbreak and other countries that were held up to try and make us look not as good as we should look because we have done an incredible job, but they're having a lot of outbreaks, but they'll be able to put them out and we put them out.

August 20:

But they like to compare us to others. So they were talking about New Zealand. New Zealand, it's over, it's over for Zealand. Everything's gone. They're beautiful. They had a massive breakout yesterday. ... It's a tough deal. We've done a great job.

Well, the news about "Zealand" sounds pretty bad.

Let's take a look.

CASES

                 New Zealand    United States
August 16             13           37,682
August 17              9           40,560
August 18             12           43,999
August 19              6           44,957
August 20              5           45,341
August 21             11           50,455
Six Days              56          262,994
2020 Totals        1,671        5,796,727

DEATHS

                 New Zealand    United States
August 16              0              527
August 17              0              571
August 18              0            1,394
August 19              0            1,284
August 20              0            1,097
August 21              0            1,170
Six Days               0            6,043
2020 Totals           22          179,200

Going back to Trump's August 20 comment: 6 cases and 0 deaths is "a massive breakout" and 44,957 cases and 1,284 deaths is "a great job".

BUT the populations of the two countries are vastly different. The US has 331,277,530 people, while New Zealand has 5,002,100.

                          New Zealand         United States
Cases Per Million              334                17,498
Deaths Per Million               4                   541

Never mind.

Some psychologists believe Trump has a sadistic "addiction" to causing pain and death and he enjoys seeing the rising US death toll. If so, then his behaviour and comments over the entirety of the pandemic start to make perfect sense.