OPINION: 75 days and nights.
Eleven long weeks. No hugs, no funerals, no school, no handshakes, no rugby, no social contact, no work, but now most crucially, no new COVID-19 cases for 18 days.
No-one has COVID-19 in New Zealand - it's been obliterated.
And while all this talk of no new cases is great, we fail to include Georgie Pie as a COVID casualty - it's coming off the menu at McDonald's.
Georgie Pie? What's next?
What terrible timing. Did we have to eliminate Georgie Pie at the same time as COVID-19? Couldn't we have had a 75 day, four step alert level system to wean us off them?
For a country that eats 66 million pies per year, surely Georgie Pie still has a place. I blame Macca's for suffocating them.
At least we can have a funeral for Georgie Pie and say goodbye properly because we're back at alert level 1. So, who are the winners and losers in all of this?
Well, the winners; Dr Ashley Bloomfeld, who was last seen walking on water as he headed home to Eastbourne on Monday night - he has the keys to the country.
The Prime Minister because she led this and Todd Muller, because without a crisis you wouldn't have heard from him. Now he's running to be Prime Minister.
The losers; Simon Bridges, who I think unfairly lost his job as his nervous MPs panicked, the Green Party - I thought they'd disappeared, and the economy is a big time loser. It's gone from the pin up poster child of what an economy should look like to a near basket case in just 12 weeks.
It's a brutal blow and no one knows when we will come back. NZ has truly become a welfare state - 1.7 million workers became overnight beneficiaries. It cost $12 billion and counting.
The lockdown lasted 11 weeks but the economic pain and uncertainty will be in our faces for at least 18 months.
But, we avoided seeing 10,000 people die of COVID-19 because we had to go hard.
So strap yourselves in, this party isn't over yet.
Duncan Garner is host of The AM Show
