That early obliviousness among the public didn’t mean there hadn’t been a flurry of frantic, behind-the-scenes activity among experts and officials.

Otago University’s Professor Michael Baker said most of his international counterparts had called the pandemic as early as January.

“Once you’ve been in this system long enough and have seen a pandemic first-hand, it does give you a sense of what they’re capable of,” he said, comparing its pre-programmed trajectory to one of a ballistic missile.

As Kiwis were taking in the news the virus was here, the health ministry’s chief science adviser, Dr Ian Town, was looking down the track.

“By the time we were contemplating community transmission, the race was on to gather evidence about the virus, analyse it and consider the appropriate public health responses,” he later told the Herald.

After weeks of politicians publicly downplaying the risk, insiders marked the turning point as the weekend before Waitangi Day.

That was when the first of many emergency Cabinet teleconferences and calls between Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Australia’s Scott Morrison prompted the Government to stop flights to China.

The ground shifted again shortly after that first case was confirmed: an ad-hoc committee was formed within Cabinet, and officials soon found new information was coming in faster than they were able to build cases for decisions.

“By the time it is clear that action is desirable, it may be too late to implement a timely response,” Treasury officials warned in a grim briefing.

New Zealand drew up its international drawbridge soon after, but there were still real fears we hadn’t acted in time. Another briefing paper said Italy and Iran’s outbreaks – by then over-running hospitals and driving up alarming fatality rates – were showing “dramatically” what could happen here.

There was the grave prospect of recession, on top of the devastating hit our $41 billion international tourism industry had already taken.

In outlining what became New Zealand’s alert level system, the experts stressed the “stark choice” the Government had to make.

Ardern used those very words three days later, when she announced an immediate, nationwide lockdown to avoid the possibility of tens of thousands of deaths. Baker wept with joy.

Could that havoc have happened? Quite easily, as Covid-19 modellers later revealed.

Delaying only another three weeks, in fact, could have cost 200 lives, 12,000 infections, and probably scotched our chances of elimination.

In all, correctly making that 11th-hour call – and choosing a zero-Covid strategy over a flatten-the-curve approach that had been prescribed by our outdated pandemic playbook – enabled the country to limit that first wave’s toll to just 22 deaths and about 1500 confirmed or probable cases.

The virus had hit hardest in the usual dangerous places – bars, weddings, conferences and rest homes – but we managed to escape the carnage that quickly unfolded elsewhere.

Over seven weeks, in long stretches of mild autumnal weather, we all hunkered down with family and flatmates.

Our daily, 1pm appointment with Ardern and Bloomfield introduced us to bubbles, clusters, genome sequencing, PCR testing and basic reproductive numbers.

We learned how to queue, socially distanced, outside supermarkets and pharmacies. We became the “team of five million”.

Guiding lights like Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles and Professor Shaun Hendy helped us place values like kindness alongside the science navigating us through the storm.

The autumn sun shone on. Motorways lay empty. Teddy bears appeared in windows. Kids played old-fashioned games in their driveways as parents moved their offices to use Zoom, and dabbled with Friday night fake-aways.

Babies were conceived. “My husband and I took turns at creating our own at-home weekly date nights during level 4,” Katy Perez said.

“They became a competition to see who could make the best date for the other once our daughter was asleep and many of them included a little too much Caribbean rum and Champagne.”

In this so-called “anthropause”, scientists listened to otherwise-undetectable earthquakes and measured air quality that wouldn’t be as clean again for decades.

On Thursday, May 14, the country emerged from lockdown, and into an island of elimination.

If we went into lockdown wracked with anxiety and uncertainty, that swiftly subsided once that circuit-breaking month effectively choked the virus to death: the last active case had recovered by June.

Researchers carrying out one of the few longitudinal surveys of their kind found lockdown came with a spike in depression – but rates quickly dropped back, even below pre-pandemic levels, once the initial wave of Covid-19 was vanquished.

After a troubled development, the NZ Covid Tracer app was launched in mid-May. QR codes made a comeback. For the most part, the move to level 2 began a year of Covid-free life, where the detection of a single stray case in our community was breaking news, all while the death toll in the US crossed the 200,000-mark.

The media’s attention shifted to the general election and a slew of bizarre scandals that engulfed an imploding National party, already on its third leader since the start of the pandemic.

Still, there were burning questions about whether our fortress could continue to hold. Experts demanded the Government do more, and do better.

They called for a massive boost to contact tracing – something now-Associate Health Minister Ayesha Verrall saw as a glaring weak point early on – along with better testing and tighter definitions of essential workers.

Over lockdown, Professor Sir David Skegg had said “every effort” needed to be made to tackle the risk at our border. That call was answered with the birth of MIQ, transforming top-end hotels into holding pens for the newly arrived.

Remarkably, just over 100 days passed before we saw another outbreak, and Aucklanders were ordered home again.

Within weeks of a South Auckland family testing positive with no strong link to the border, the Auckland August cluster swelled to become the single largest connected group of Covid-19 victims in the country yet.

Among the 180 people it dragged in, across churches, schools and workplaces, a disproportionate number were Pasifika. Bloomfield was forced to condemn racist remarks as “disappointing and gutless”.

“The uncertainty is overwhelming, so we're trying to bring just a bit of calmness to the situation,” said Jerome Mika, of Māngere’s Assembly of God Church of Samoa.

Lockdown soon prevailed again, enabling officials to declare the cluster closed by November.

As Kiwis celebrated Christmas Day of 2020, just a handful of new cases were reported at the border.

The pandemic again seemed a world away, and it was: that same day in England, another 570 deaths pushed the UK’s death toll past 70,000.

Underlying that continuing surge was a virus evolving.

Alpha, up to 80 per cent more transmissible, was carried into Auckland and Northland by an infected woman in mid-January.

Somehow, not one of more than 300 contacts – or thousands of community tests – turned out to be a positive case. We weren’t as lucky on the next throw of the dice.

“I know we all feel the same way when this happens, we all get that sense of ‘not again’,” Ardern told the country on Valentine’s Day night, in an emergency press conference announcing three fresh cases in Auckland, and the city’s third snap lockdown.

Mindful of the electorate’s growing impatience with lockdowns and being shut off from the rest of the world, Ardern had used her first address of 2021 to proclaim it “the year of the vaccine”.

Behind the scenes, officials had been locked in an international tussle to negotiate access. Even as far back as May 2020, when nearly 200 vaccine trials were underway, officials told Cabinet any path to vaccination would be a bumpy one.

There were worries manufacturing countries would look after their own first – and that just a three-month delay could cause an economic drain costing billions of dollars.

Throughout much of 2020, New Zealand’s approach was to hedge its bets between suppliers.

On the day Pfizer announced the results of its phase III trials – showing its sophisticated MRNA vaccine was safe and effective – Ardern announced a deal with the company that would secure enough doses for a fifth of the population.

In March 2021, the Government opted to go all-in with Pfizer, ordering another 8.5 million doses, at a cost later revealed to be around $36 a pop.

Skegg was one of the many specialists who had recommended the switch, even though it led to a slower roll-out than using whatever we could get our hands on.

Still, it gave the population access to one of the most effective vaccines on the planet, proving more than 90 per cent effective at blocking symptomatic infection. Alongside vaccine negotiations, planners had spent a year exploring how the roll-out would happen.

Expecting initial shortages in supply, they came up with a “sequencing framework” that split the population in four, largely based on age bands, with older cohorts first. It was a mammoth logistical effort, eclipsing the HPV vaccine drive more than a decade before.

Entrenched problems around access and inequity were flagged up front, but ultimately not addressed, as poorer rates and delayed delivery among Māori later showed.

Still, health workers went hard at bringing the vaccine to deprived neighbourhoods. Manurewa Marae’s Takutai Kemp urged everyone – but “especially our Māori and Pacific cuzzies” – to step aboard a vaccination bus named Shot Cuzz.

Early surveys suggested only three quarters of Kiwis intended to get the shot. The scourge of social media-driven misinformation loomed large.

While experts were reluctant to talk about coverage targets, the Herald charged ahead with a campaign to push for 90 per cent coverage by Christmas. Initially seen as aspirational at best, the big drive crossed that threshold with days to spare.

As at this week, an astonishing 95.5 per cent of eligible Kiwis had received at least one jab, making New Zealand one of the most vaccinated countries in the world.

At a Wellington forum last August, when the vaccine roll-out opened up to another two million people, Skegg said Kiwis had been enjoying what he called a “golden year”. 

Its zenith was arguably the opening of the transtasman bubble last April, providing a bridge between two countries that had achieved what few others in the world could. 

Only we’d been living in a “phoney war” against Covid-19. In attempting to illustrate the uncertainty leaders faced in crafting long-term plans against an ever-evolving foe, Skegg drew another analogy to 1940. 

“How could he have known that Hitler would turn his troops on the Russians, or that the Japanese would bomb Pearl Harbour and enter the war?” 

Neither he, nor any of us, could have known that, at that moment, a new menace had already crept past our defences and begun silently spreading in Auckland. 

Coronavirus variant B.1.617.2 had already driven a catastrophic second wave in India, where bodies piled up faster than workers could burn them. One US public health scientist called it the “greatest threat” of the pandemic. 

For New Zealand, Delta delivered the death of the elimination dream. 

When it was confirmed in a North Shore man on August 17 – the infection having stemmed back, somehow, to a traveller from Delta-ridden New South Wales just over a week before – the country’s alert level 4 shield sprang up again. 

Delta crashed into our defences like a storm swell against a seawall. When Kiwis outside Auckland woke to their first day of lockdown in more than a year, the outbreak already numbered an astonishing 800 to 1000 cases then-undetected because of the infection lag. 

That included dozens who were part of a Birkdale network, which centred around a household that was connected to a tradesman’s business in Devonport. There was also the super-spreader event at the Assembly of God church service in Māngere, attended by 500 mainly Pacific people, from where someone carrying the virus hopped on a plane to Wellington. 

The genome of the cases that seeded the church subcluster had a mutation, which allowed ESR scientists to track it. Level 4 almost slammed the door on this subcluster, but once Delta took root in larger, intergenerational households, the battle was likely lost. 

When the Government moved most of the country to level 3 on September 25, experts called it a “calculated risk”, but privately feared we were letting Delta out of its cage. 

In any case, New Zealand needed a fresh game-plan against this new breed of fast-spreading variants, which arrived in the form of the traffic light system. 

Borrowing parts of the old regime, freedom under the new Covid-19 Protection Framework largely hinged on vaccination rates, and risk of hospitals being overrun. 

The entry of domestic vaccine passes for pubs, restaurants and flights was enough to see tensions that had built over lockdowns grow to the unprecedented scenes we see outside Parliament today. 

But the system also meant that weary Aucklanders, even with the virus rife in their suburbs, at least didn’t have to face the prospect of Christmas in lockdown. 

Had Delta not destroyed elimination, the unstoppable new variant that swept in on its heels most certainly would have. 

When it was first discovered in South Africa, Omicron’s frightening number of mutations caused instant alarm.  

That was until it became welcomely apparent that, while Omicron was built to spread and evade immunity – being between two and four times more contagious than Delta – the average infection was much milder. 

Nearly everywhere in the world, it has nearly displaced its much deadlier predecessor. 

Modellers quickly sketched out what an Omicron wave would look like here. A short, sharp rise to a high peak. Tens of thousands of cases. Stretched hospitals. An end to intensive testing and tracing. 

With Omicron now beginning to wash over our communities, pushing daily case counts into the thousands, the Covid-19 pandemic appears to have finally arrived in a country that, for the past two years, had all but eluded it. 

Even as at this week, New Zealand, with 61 deaths, could boast the lowest Covid-19 mortality rate in the developed world.  

Had New Zealand suffered the mass tragedy that various other countries did, on a per capita basis, we might have seen 19,900 deaths (the US experience), 13,700 (UK), 9470 (Sweden), or 5350 (Denmark). 

In fact, New Zealand’s life expectancy actually increased over the past two years.  

While the US recorded more than 1.1 million excess deaths over the period, we had a net decline. 

“These impacts are far more positive than experiences by all other high-income countries during this pandemic period,” Otago University public health experts reported this week.