After one week of alert level 3, Māngere Floral Studio in Auckland's Māngere Bridge has been busier than ever for owner Sepali Naus.
"People were asking me for flowers when we were in level 4, of course we couldn't do that, so I was expecting ... a busy, busy first week back."
Naus said being a small operation at alert level 3 meant the safety guidelines had not been too difficult to put in place. She could have operated just as safely during alert level 4, she said.
Even if she had been allowed to, Naus did not think it would have been financially viable.
"The problem is the supply of product and willingness of people to come and purchase from you. That would have been the problem. I wouldn't have had the same amount of sales to have the shop open to take that risk.
"I don't think I would have been able to get couriers to deliver. So I actually don't think we could have done it at level 4."
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Comparing Australia and NZ
On Tuesday, New Zealand announced no new Covid-19 cases for its second day in a row.
On Monday, Australia marked 100 days since its first confirmed case of Covid-19, with just 27 new cases across the country.
Both countries have managed to flatten their curves in almost the same amount of time, but Australia's restrictions have not been as tight as New Zealand's, prompting questions as to whether New Zealand's government could have eased restrictions sooner, lessening the forecast impact on the economy.
While some have looked across the ditch with envy, Victoria's Monash University epidemiology professor Allen Cheng said the situations were not as different between the two countries as people may think.
An electronic screen advertises free COVID-19 testing being offered at Bondi Beach in Sydney today. Photo: AFP
"I think it has actually been a lot more similar than people say. I think New Zealand probably locked down slightly earlier and slightly harder than we have, but I think Australia and New Zealand have probably taken a fairly similar approach."
Over the past six weeks, the rules across Australia's territories and states were similar to each other, with some minor differences.
Generally, people could still go to work if they were not able to do so from home, they could still get haircuts, and they could use babysitting services if they needed to.
Retail shops have been allowed to stay open with a 'four-square-metre' rule. That means no more than one person for every four-square-metres of available floor space is allowed inside a shop.
Queensland and the Northern Territory have now opened playgrounds to the public for the first time in weeks.
In Queensland you could have up to two visitors in your own home. In New South Wales you could meet up with a friend at a public place but you must stay 1.5 metres away from each other.
Bars and restaurants have been allowed to stay open to provide takeaway services. The country's mining and construction industries have also continued to operate.
Dr Cheng says while allowing more businesses to stay open sounds good in theory, in practise the reality has been markedly different in Australia.
"There's never been an absolute dictum that you can't open a shop, but that you can only sort of allow a certain number of people into a shop, and then that just makes it not financially viable.
"A lot of businesses have pretty thin margins, so any restriction would make it very difficult for them. But in terms of what it actually translates to on the ground is often different to what the policy is."
Wellington-based economist Elizabeth Kendall has spent many years forecasting and modelling at the Reserve Bank in Australia and New Zealand, and has been watching consumer reaction closely across both countries.
"Even though Australia's lockdown has not been so strict, the behavioural response of people in the face of this outbreak is that they have really responded by staying home and not spending," she said.
"So activity has been reduced in places even where it was permitted. And so we've actually seen a reduction in activity in Australia that is more similar to New Zealand than you might expect."
University of Otago epidemiologist Dr Brian Cox said that without the lockdown, New Zealand would not have been prepared for a Covid-19 outbreak.
"Australia was very good at contact tracing, we weren't. We had planning for a flu pandemic but this isn't flu, this is a cluster-based epidemic which is a completely different beast, and you have a different way of tackling it," Dr Cox said.
"That involves early diagnosis, contact tracing, contacting [people] quickly and isolating them. We didn't have any plan for that approach at all and we had to go into a lockdown to cope with the fact that our contact tracing wasn't as good as it should be."
The trade-off of being more cautious, going hard and going early was the right call in New Zealand, Kendall said.
"Overseas we've seen that the consequences of going too slow and being too loose in restrictions has sort of devastating consequences. I think we made the right call.
"Maybe at the margin we could have been a little bit looser in our restrictions but ultimately, we've saved a whole lot of lives and I think that's a great success."
