Audrey Young: Coronavirus - an incredible week for government and NZ's fight against Covid-19

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo / Mark Mitchell

A mere $900 million bailout for Air New Zealand.

It would normally be a gobsmacking story but in the tumultuous coronavirus-related events of the past week, it hardly seems exceptional.

It goes without saying that the Government had to support the airline which is too important to fail.

What an incredible seven days it has been for the country and the Government.

The ultimate judgment of the decisions taken must necessarily remain months and possibly years away, but they certainly feel correct in the short term.

It is a week in which the Government has done more to earn the confidence of the public than any other since being installed in 2017.

And that means not just Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, but Finance Minister Grant Robertson, Health Minister David Clark, Education Minister Chris Hipkins, and even Foreign Minister Winston Peters who has mercifully ditched his sense of victimhood over the New Zealand First Foundation and is getting on with governing.

We saw a significant job retention package, an improvement in testing policy, some clarity about the provision of ventilators, a good response to the first school with a positive student, strong self-isolation and border rules, help for Kiwis abroad and a clear message that things will ramp up more when there is a community outbreak.

There has been a sense this week that the whole-of-government approach is a practical reality and not just a bureaucratic slogan wheeled out to sound reassuring.

The decision to shut the border to outsiders, to limit gathering to 100 people or less, and requiring all incoming passengers to self-isolate for 14 days is having a traumatic effect on some people's lives and plans.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo / Mark Mitchell

There must be exceptions made for exceptional circumstances.

But in the long run, it may help to avoid the devastation being wreaked on Italy or avoid the devastation of 1918 when 9000 New Zealanders died, many of them without proper care or even a proper grave.

On the face of it, the number of foreign visitors bringing in coronavirus to New Zealand did not seem that much to justify such drastic action as shutting them out completely.

On the day Ardern announced the decision, only five of the 28 positives had been foreign visitors.

But the Government saw problems and distractions ahead.

In the week since the Government imposed requirement for 14 days of self-isolation for all people entering the country, it became evident that compliance would be an ongoing problem.

It was going to take up a lot of resource to vet visitors who, let's face it, would be less motivated than New Zealanders and residents to comply with self-isolation in a bid to suppress the virus.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters at his Beehive desk.

For visitors, it is an inconvenience and easily flouted. For nationals it is about the health and financial well-being of themselves and their families.

The border move has the support of business leaders because they know that without getting on top of the health crisis, the economy which is already in freefall would fall even further.

It is a matter of short term pain for, fingers crossed, longer term gain.

Already the Government is hearing pleas for compassionate consideration for foreigners already working here to have their temporary work visas extended.

That is not necessarily going to receive a sympathetic ear when not only is the unemployment rate here expected to soar, but there could be thousands of Kiwis returning home from Australia where they are not entitled to social welfare support.

The sub-standard treatment of New Zealand taxpayers in Australia may have been corrosive, as Ardern has repeatedly said, but the practical effect of it is now going to bite very hard on.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo / Mark Mitchell

It is positive, however, that New Zealand has kept in lockstep with Australia during the crisis and that Ardern and Scott Morrison are in constant contact with each other.

Ardern needlessly downplays the degree with which New Zealand and Australia are in sync.

No one believes the Australian Cabinet is making New Zealand's decisions, if that is why she is so sensitive.

The transtasman border restriction must be the first one that is lifted when the time is right and it is important to have responses synchronised in order for that to happen as soon as is humanly possible.

Ardern and Morrison carefully co-ordinated the self-isolation requirements a week ago and the border closures to non-qualifying foreigners on Thursday.

The one bum note that Ardern repeatedly strikes is how much bolder New Zealand is to other countries in its response - which prompted ZB host Mike Hosking to tell her that it was not a contest.

The ramping up of New Zealand's response coincides with important changes in the way the virus is being fought.

Without fanfare, the New Zealand Government, like the British Government, is taking guidance from a group of experts whose work on Covid-19 has been published by Imperial College, London.

It models the effects of various policy responses - isolation in the home; quarantining of households; social distancing; and closure of schools and universities.

It estimates what pressure each policy individually and combined would have on the hospital system, and how many deaths were likely under two different approaches to the disease - mitigating the onset of its effects (flattening the curve) and suppressing it to a point where secondary transmission is statistically less than one person.

It makes sobering reading and was enough for Britain to change its response.

It has gone from one of mitigation, in which the estimated death rates were unacceptably high, to suppression which lowers the death rate but imposes more restrictions for longer.

For Britain, the modelling showed between 550,000 deaths at the high end to 5600 at the low end, depending which responses were employed at various trigger points in the spread of the epidemic.

The intended effect is to have the epidemic present in smaller and more manageable waves, rather than one tsunami.

The modelling has also played an important part in New Zealand's response Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield and David Clark acknowledged this week.

There was a change in language in New Zealand evidenced by Ardern when she announced the border controls. She now talks about managing the epidemic into a series of smaller waves, and "suppressing" the wave.

Changing responses is fine. It is based on estimates by infectious disease experts in which informed guesswork has to do.