Covid 19 coronavirus: Donald Trump on New Zealand's new outbreak

The US President has turned his attention to New Zealand's 'surge' in Covid cases. Photo / Getty

Donald Trump says he doesn't want the US to have a "big surge" in Covid cases like in New Zealand.

The US President, whose administration has been battling the highest recorded coronavirus case numbers in the world, made the comments when addressing a crowd in Mankato, Minnesota.

"You see what's going on in New Zealand?" Trump said.

"They beat it they beat, it was like front page [news] they beat it because they wanted to show me something."

"The problem is [there is a] big surge in New Zealand, you know it's terrible - we don't want that.

"This is an invisible enemy, that should have never been let to come to this country, to Europe to the rest of the world by China, just remember it," he said.

New Zealand now has 78 active cases of Covid-19 after a resurgence of infections in the community last week. Prior to that, New Zealand had been trumpeted around the world after recording 100 days without Covid spreading inside our borders.

US President Donald Trump has turned his attention to New Zealand's resurgence in Covid cases. Photo / Getty

The new outbreak put Auckland - where the latest case cluster is centred - in alert level 3 lockdown. The rest of the country is in alert level 2. Five people are presently in hospital. Twenty-two people have died since the pandemic hit our shores.

The US has recorded more than 5,420,000 Covid cases. More than 170,000 people have died in the US from the virus.

More than 5 million people in the US have tested positive for Covid-19. Photo / AP

Trump has found a new doctor for his coronavirus task force — and this time there's no daylight between them.

Trump last week announced that Dr Scott Atlas, a frequent guest on Fox News Channel, has joined the White House as a pandemic adviser. Atlas, the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center and a fellow at Stanford's conservative Hoover Institution, has no expertise in public health or infectious diseases.

But he has long been a critic of coronavirus lockdowns and has campaigned for kids to return to the classroom and for the return of college sports, just like Trump.

"Scott is a very famous man who's also very highly respected," Trump told reporters as he introduced the addition. "He has many great ideas and he thinks what we've done is really good."

- additional reporting AP