“Was the word angry?” Ardern said, reflecting on Trump’s comments. She said that while the new cases were very concerning, “to be described in that way was a misrepresentation of New Zealand’s position.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
New Zealand’s response to the virus was one of the most successful, along with the measures taken by China, Taiwan and Thailand early in the pandemic. The country of 5 million has counted only 25 deaths and has managed to eradicate the spread of COVID-19, allowing people to return to workplaces, schools and packed sports stadiums without restrictions.
When the virus started hitting Europe early in the year, Ardern said, the only two options countries considered were herd immunity or flattening the curve. She chose the latter.
“Originally, that was where we started, because there just wasn’t really an opinion that elimination was possible,” she said.
But her thinking quickly changed.
‘I remember my chief science advisor bringing me a graph that showed me what a flattening of the curve would look like for New Zealand. And where our hospital and health capacity was. And the curve was not below that line. So we knew that flattening the curve wasn’t enough for us. “
Ardern said she was not worried that elimination would turn out to be impossible because even if New Zealand didn’t get there, the approach would still have saved lives.
“The alternative is to set a lower goal and still fail,” she said.
Border closures and a strict lockdown in March put an end to the disease, and New Zealand went 102 days without any spread of the community. But then came the August outbreak in Auckland, which is still unexplained but likely originated abroad.
“We thought we had experienced the worst. And so it was a real psychological blow to people. And I felt that too. So it was very, very difficult, ”said Ardern.
She said they modeled several outbreak scenarios, but the scenario that emerged was “about the worst imaginable.”
That’s because the outbreak had spread to multiple groups in densely populated areas, she said, and some who caught it had attended large church meetings. But after a second lockdown in Auckland, New Zealand has once again eradicated the disease.
Ardern said she felt confident about her responses, despite feeling a whiff of imposter syndrome at times in her role as a leader.
‘You just have to keep doing it. There’s work to be done, ”she said. “Any doubt about myself I ever have, just like a human, doesn’t mean it always translates into doubt about what should be done.”
Two months after the second outbreak, Ardern faced an election campaign. She won a second term in a landslide, with her liberal Labor Party winning a majority of all votes, something that last happened in New Zealand’s multiparty system in 1951.
After seeing President-elect Joe Biden win the US election shortly after, Ardern said she hoped to improve the relationship between the two nations.
She said her job is to build good relationships with every leader.
“But there’s no question that when some of your ideas and values are similar, it’s easier,” she said. “So that’s the foundation, I think, on which we’ll build the relationship with the new president.”
Ardern said she is not afraid to sometimes take a stand against a more aggressive China, despite New Zealand relying on Beijing as its largest trading partner.
“My personal opinion is that we’ve come to a point where we can raise issues,” Ardern said. “We are quite predictable in the fact that we do that. And I think that’s an important part of our independent foreign policy. “
To bring the world back to normal, Ardern said, extensive work must be done to ensure that everyone can be vaccinated against COVID-19 and put in place a vaccine certification process that allows people to travel.
She is concerned that the economic impact of the virus is exacerbating wealth inequalities, and that New Zealanders have defied previous predictions by driving house prices to new all-time highs.
She said there is a psychology behind New Zealand’s financial obsession with housing that needs to be explored otherwise ‘we won’t figure out how to get people back to other parts of the economy’.
Ardern said she plans to take some time off in the Southern Hemisphere to spend with her fiancé Clarke Gayford and their 2-year-old daughter Neve.
“I’m not doing anything,” she said with a laugh. ‘But I’ll be by the sea. It will be great. “