Well here we are, nearly at the end of our country's first ever lockdown. 4 weeks or 289 days that at times have passed as slowly as a glacier but not seems to be tripping merrily towards a new phase of existence on this planet.

For me this lockdown has provided everything it said on the box. It has been just as good and just as bad as we were told to expect at the beginning.

We were told it was a month right from the beginning so why did anyone waste their breath trying to change that. If takes up to 2 weeks after infection to fall sick and 2 weeks to recover then 4 weeks was always going to be the minimum to clear out the virus.

Why the UK thought 3 weeks made sense I'll never know. Obviously they also didn't know because they've now extended their lockdown to 6 weeks all up.

Which is a slightly bad sign for us. Even acknowledging that their curve was ahead of ours and so they locked down later than us, it is a sign that a month or so is the bare minimum to put a roadblock in front of the spread of a virus.

But a month we were told and the infection rate has nearly petered out even if there is a small and stubborn tail. Some call this the PM's failed science experiment. What a load of tosh. It's classic infection containment. On an industrial scale.

We were told it was going to slam our economy and it has and it will. But remember it's slamming every economy. 22 million jobs lost in the United States in the time of Covid and they've barely locked down at all. What does that number mean? In 2018, around 155 million people were employed in the United States. 22 million is 14 per cent of 155 million. And the States have only just started. We're not going to escape those numbers. This is global.

• Update – 19 April, 2020
• Should New Zealand leave COVID-19 lockdown this week?
• New Zealand's 1422 coronavirus cases
• No more COVID-19 deaths, 13 new cases reported

We were actually told the effect would be unprecedented. Well the Great Depression and the Black October and the GFC set some precedents. So yeah it's going to be bad. I'm amazed that over the past 10 days people have started to talk about the economic impact like it's some sort of insight and revelation. People like Bob Jones and Gareth Morgan. Thanks boys we already knew. Yesterday John Roughan claimed that this government doesn't understand the hurt small business is feeling. He had no facts to back that up. Just a feeling. Thanks buddy. That was helpful.

Let's hear from to the grown-ups shall we. Rob Fyfe has been working as business liaison between the government and business 7 days a week since lockdown and before. He was interviewed by Fran O'Sullivan yesterday. It's the most hopeful thing you'll read in a land on little hope. It told me that business was aware of the scenario. That business is not dependent on the governments telling them what to do. Also that the government is listening to what business need. It told me that we are all in this together and that the truly resilient were banding together to forge a new path since the old normal has gone.

Go read it.  You’ll learn more from that than from retired business leaders reckons.

A lot of people have said that we’ve over reacted and there’s been criticism of Treasury releasing worst case scenario figures.  But as Rob says in the article, we don’t know what’s going to happen. “So to me, from the perspective of a businessman, I'm always planning for the worst-case scenario. Anything from there is upside, right?"

So we may have committed too many hospital beds but if we hadn’t and it was worse than we expected there would be hell to pay.  I see the UK is decommissioning a temporary hospital for 1000 because they didn’t need it.

And there are still a number of people who say that in the fullness of time Covid 19 will be revealed to be a small pandemic that we over-reacted to. 

Well I hope so, because that will mean we will recover quickly just as the world did with SARS.

But remember there is an old saying “Better Safe Than Sorry”.  It’s not wrong.