There are nine new coronavirus cases in New Zealand and one additional death. The death brings the total toll to 12 and is of a man in Invercargill who died at home and who was linked to the Bluff wedding cluster.
ANALYSIS
Yesterday Jacinda Ardern had three different responses when asked about the key public health measures she will be weighing up for lockdown D-Day today.
She was absolutely confident on watertight border controls and how well the health system can cope with what Covid-19 still has to throw at it.
She was encouraged by the signs that pointed to a lack of any community transmission, which could quickly escalate to a new outbreak.
And she asked for New Zealanders' help with contact-tracing by getting tested for the slightest of sniffles and keeping a diary of where they've been and who they've been with.
It's clear that the crux of today's decision is a judgement call on the likelihood of community transmission, and how quickly any new outbreak can be contained and snuffed out.
There are plenty of reasons to argue that the lockdown has put us in a position to move to lockdown lite from Thursday.
If undetected outbreaks were sweeping through the country, we would see increasing numbers of new cases every day, overwhelmed hospitals and a much higher number of deaths.
The number of community transmission cases - where the source of infection is unknown - would also be snowballing. Such cases are rightly treated as more risky because the chain of transmission is harder to ring-fence and snuff out.
There are currently about 60 such cases, but only six have popped up since the lockdown started - and only two in the past few days. Those were in Timaru and Whanganui.
The reasonable assumption is that the lockdown restrictions have shut down the infection cycle of the older cases, while targeted testing around the new ones is enough to identify and isolate any potential for new outbreaks to take off.
Targeted testing has already happened in Timaru and is being considered in Whanganui, where testing has already been ramped up in the past weeks to improve the low per capita testing rate there.
The handful of new community transmission cases has also been a great help to the contact-tracing conundrum.
If our tracers had been chasing the contacts of hundreds of new cases a day, the issues around data and capacity would be a much bigger deal-breaker.
Public health experts have been decrying the lack of good contact-tracing data, and health chief Ashley Bloomfield all but confirmed this yesterday when he said the Health Ministry had spent the weekend collating as much information as possible for Cabinet to make its big call.
Director General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield will provide advice to Cabinet today on the public health criteria for coming out of lockdown. Photo / File
So how many contact-traces have we done, how long does it take, and how long would it take at alert level 3 when we all have bigger bubbles, or at level 2 when physical distancing guidelines drop to one metre?
We haven't been told, and we still haven't seen a damning independent audit of our contact-tracing processes.
We have been told, however, that tracing quickly and comprehensively can be as good as a vaccine, and Bloomfield said yesterday that we are still one week away from the "gold standard" of being able to trace 80 per cent of contacts within three days.
That doesn't mean that lifting the lockdown is off the table. The low number of new daily cases means that we don't have to contact-trace 1000 new cases a day.
But the further we move from lockdown, where contact-tracing typically involves all the people in one bubble, the better our contact-tracing needs to be.
Cabinet will also consider wider social damage and public tolerance for lockdown.
The past week in particular has shone a light on Australia and its positive results in a less restrictive lockdown. That has the potential for trans-Tasman envy, particularly among the shaggy-haired; hairdressers are essential services in Australia but they can't operate in New Zealand under alert level 3 or 4.
Any sign of that bubbling to the surface could play on the PM's mind, though she could counter it by citing Australia's four-week lockdown extension.
Similar extensions have also been announced in the UK, New York, France and Canada.
And then there's the economy. Half a million more workers, or almost 20 per cent of the workforce, would return to work at level 3.
That could be reason enough to move to lockdown lite, coupled with the reasonable belief that it would still be restrictive enough to keep New Zealand on course for elimination.
But if Ardern releases us only to re-impose lockdown later on, she would have squandered the gains that have come from all of our sacrifices.
The Government is thinking about alert levels in terms of two-week infection cycles, but a good compromise could be to have a shorter extension until after the Anzac weekend.
The one-week breathing space would enable a gold standard stamp for our contact-tracing, and move us closer to a tech-solution to enhance capacity.
It would allow more random community testing among another 30,000-odd tests, including in areas where the source of infection has eluded health officials. The value of this is clear in light of academic research suggesting there might be as many as 500 infectious yet undetected cases in New Zealand right now.
And it would bring us closer to elimination, which both Ardern and the Treasury have said is much better for the economy - and for all of us - than yo-yoing between alert levels.
