Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has congratulated the United States president-elect, Joe Biden, and invited him to visit New Zealand.

Jacinda Ardern hailed Biden who defeated incumbent President Donald Trump in the United State’s presidential elections which took place on Nov 3.

In a 20-minutes phone conversation, Ardern said Biden spoke very favourably about how New Zealand was handling the covid-19 pandemic.

“We discussed Covid-19 and the president-elect spoke positively about New Zealand’s response to the pandemic,” the prime minister said.

“What has been really at the centre of our response has been some fundamentals around testing, contact tracing, isolation,” Ardern said. “That’s over and above what we’ve done at our borders.”

“I offered to him and his team access to New Zealand health officials in order to share their experience on things we’ve learnt on our Covid-19 journey.”

This will come in handy for the US who have the highest COVID-19 infections and death rate in the world with New Zealand being one of the most successful in the world in the fight against the deadly virus.

While America has a record of over 12million infections and over 262,700 deaths, New Zealand has 2,030 and 25 deaths since the virus which Trump had previously called “China Virus” broke out in the Hubei Province of Wuhan, China in December 2019.

According to the PM, the US president-elect Joe Biden wants to “reinvigorate” the two countries’ relationship and “he[Biden] spoke of his fond memories of visiting New Zealand years ago. He was very pleased to be invited to come back here.”

She told reporters she raised “the importance of organisations like the World Trade Organisation to a country like New Zealand … [and] our eagerness to support work to unblock some of the issues we’ve experienced”.[The Guardian]