The prime minister has announced the lockdown status will come to an end in a week, with alert level three to remain in force for at least two weeks.

Read Jacinda Ardern’s speech in full here

New Zealand will exit alert level four in a week, at 11.59pm on Monday April 27, Jacinda Ardern has announced at a Beehive press conference. Alert level three will then hold for a minimum of two weeks. Further decisions will be made by cabinet on May 11.

“We have done what very few countries have been able to do,” she said. “We have stopped a wave of devastation.” The director general of health was “confident there is currently no widespread community transmission in New Zealand,” she said.

Ardern said cabinet had looked at a range of data. “We looked at the gains we have made in our results, but also our systems,” she said.

“We considered that the longer we are in lockdown, the less likely it is we will need to go back. We also considered moving alert levels on April 23, which is in just 48 hours’ time. The sacrifice made to date has been huge, and cabinet wanted to make sure we lock in our gains, and give ourselves some additional certainty. Waiting to move alert levels next week costs us just two more business days, but gives us much greater longterm health and economic returns down the track. It means we are less likely to have to go backward. ”

It was a “balanced approach”, she said, and one which Ashley Bloomfield “not only supported, but also recommended”.

This week businesses will be allowed to take preparations for opening, which meant employers could re-enter premises to receive stock if necessary, as long as they adhere to distancing and “bubble” requirements. “This is not an early move out of alerts – it is merely a matter of preparation,” said Ardern.

She said around 400,000 people were expected to return to work at alert level three.

Schools and early learning centres would be accessible this week for cleaning, maintenance and other preparations. “The current plan is for schools to be able to reopen for a teacher-only day on April 28 as part of their preparation and we expect those who need to attend to be able to from April 29,” she said.

The announcement follows a meeting of the full cabinet, also attended by the director-general of health, Ashley Bloomfield. At the press conference, Bloomfield addressed testing capability. “These are now among the highest in the world,” he said.

“In the coming weeks we will continue to focus on testing people with symptoms suggestive of Covid-19, and hunting out any undetected cases that might exist. We will continue to undertake community and other sentinel testing as part of our ongoing surveillance.”

Testing on asymptomatic workers at places where recent cases had been recorded would be scaled up, he said.

The contact tracing system was being “transformed”, said Bloomfield. What had been a “very local, manual process” was becoming a “national, automated system, with scale”.

When Ardern announced the four-week lockdown last month, it was provisionally set to end at midnight on Wednesday April 22. Simon Bridges, the leader of the opposition National Party, said the decision to delay that shift was down to government failure.

“Unfortunately the government hasn’t done enough and isn’t ready by its own standards and rhetoric. New Zealand is being held back because the government has not used this time to ensure best practice of testing and tracing and the availability of PPE hasn’t been at the standard it should have been,” he said in a statement.

“The rate of testing for the first half of lockdown was low, work has only just begun on surveillance testing to confirm whether community transmission is occurring. Tracing is the biggest challenge and experts have identified major shortcomings in the methods being used by the government.”

He added: “This is a real shame as businesses will suffer further damage and that will lead to poor health outcomes as a result of the huge stress this will cause for a lot of people.

Ardern characterised level three as a “recovery room”. It sanctions, in some specific situations, for people to widen their bubbles, “to reconnect with close family / whānau, or bring in caregivers, or support isolated people”.

Level three did come “with higher trust and high expectations of New Zealanders not to lose that trust”, said Ardern. She said police would continue to enforce the rules. “People will still be asked questions when they’re moving around … but there is more trust at alert level three.”

Under level three, businesses that can ensure physical distancing and a lack of any contact with customers are able to open. The emphasis shifts from “essential” to “safe” businesses. Public bars, cafes, malls and retail stores would for the most part be required to remain closed, however. Weddings, funerals and tangi would become permissible, but with a cap on attendance of 10 people.

Recent days have seen pushback from teachers about plans for reopening, with the Early Childhood Education Council writing to the prime minister last night urging her to reconsider, and keep centres closed until a downgrade to alert level two.

Asked about these concerns, Bloomfield said: “Covid-19 doesn’t affect children and teens in the same way as adults. [They] tend to have low infection rates, they don’t become as unwell if they do get infected, and they don’t tend to pass the virus onto adults.”

Ardern stressed that “the guidance is if you can keep your children at home, you should keep your children at home”.

Among the materials examined by cabinet was a report by the public health expert Ayesha Verrall on New Zealand’s contact tracing. It contained “very constructive feedback and guidance on how to further build our contact tracing capability and capacity to ensure it achieves our aspriation of ‘gold standard'”, said Bloomfield.

The report is now available on the Ministry of Health website here.

Along with contact tracing and confidence around community transmission, the two other criteria outlined by Ardern yesterday were robust self-isolation, quarantine and border measures, and the capacity of health system, including the availability of protective equipment, or PPE.

Ardern also noted the cabinet would look at “evidence of the effects of the measures on the economy and on society more broadly”, including “public attitudes towards the measures and the extent to which people and businesses understand, accept and are overall complying with them”.

Speaking to RNZ this morning, Shaun Hendy, who has been leading a modelling project for the government at Te Pūnaha Matatini, suggested that the best course in pursuit of the elimination strategy would be to extend the lockdown by a full fortnight.

“It would make sense to delay lifting the lockdown as we know level four works,” he said.

“If it was up to me, I’d be leaning towards taking a little bit longer, making sure those numbers were coming down and heading to zero.”

His modelling suggested that “another two weeks is the safest”, but suggested that at least extending to the end of Anzac weekend would “split the difference”.

Earlier today, the Ministry of Health announced nine new cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand, the third single-digit result in four days.

The total of confirmed and probable cases in New Zealand is 1,440, but two-thirds of those of those – 974 – are now classed as recovered, leaving an “active case” total of fewer than 500.

Twelve people have died in New Zealand with Covid-19.

Read more of today’s developments here.

The decision, to be announced late afternoon, will be based on public health advice. But it is and should be a call made by elected representatives. Toby Manhire assesses the stakes.

Cabinet meets at 10.30 this morning: an early start. They will log on, most of them from their homes around the country, to make a very big decision for New Zealand: is it time to exit alert level four?

One of the strangest things about where we are today is that the sentence above will make sense to almost everyone reading it. Just a couple of months ago it would be a riddle, or bad science fiction. But that is where we live now. Clusters, curves, contact tracing: we speak a new language. There’s no live sport or theatre or pubs, but there is a daily Covid statistics call. Just when it seems absurd, comical, a blizzard hits, reminding you of the stakes. Lives have been upended, livelihoods smashed apart. It is terrible here, it is more terrible there. The world is flipped on its head.

A year ago, Jacinda Ardern was being showered in praise for her response to mass-murder at two Christchurch mosques. Today she is being lauded again, most recently in a Financial Times column published yesterday that was so overcome it wanted to canonise and knight her at the same time: “Arise Saint Jacinda, a leader for our troubled times” was the headline.

The accolades are warranted, and even a fillip in locked down New Zealand. Never has the sobriquet of “the Anti-Trump” looked truer than when watching the US president’s deranged coronavirus press briefing back-to-back with that of his New Zealand counterpart.

But let’s not get carried away: the course plotted by Ardern’s government is not guaranteed. Beware anyone who tells you with absolute certainty that it means we’ll be better placed than most of the world in a year’s time – were they predicting with equal certainty two months ago that the world would be where it is now?

Cabinet meets at 10.30 to decide. Yesterday, Ardern laid out the four criteria. Border measures and quarantining need to be robust. That gets a tick. The health system needs to have capacity. That gets a tick, too, even if concerns around the provision of protective equipment, in some regions more than others, remain.

Then there’s the question of undetected community transmission. Expanding clusters or cases that can be connected to existing ones are bad. Cases without an obvious source are much worse. A form of “surveillance testing” has in recent days begun, located near the only remaining human hives: supermarkets. Irrespective of any necessary symptoms, people are tested. The good news is that so far none has tested positive. Whether enough people have yet been tested in this manner to provide great confidence that fresh outbreaks might not burst into view is another matter.

Finally, there’s contact tracing. No matter how intoxicating the downward slope of active cases might feel, there will be more cases, and not all of them will have obvious provenance. The ability to swiftly identify the people with whom a positive case has come into contact is absolutely critical to stamping out the embers of Covid-19. It always has been so: over a month ago, the contact-tracing impediments of the Pasifika Festival and the Christchurch Remembrance Service were central to the decision to cancel.

Public health expert Ayesha Verrall has completed an audit of contact tracing systems for the Ministry of Health. That report will go before cabinet today. The director general of health, Ashley Bloomfield, yesterday said New Zealand was on a path to having a “gold standard” in contact tracing. There is plenty of talk of the role of technology in contact tracing – and that will almost certainly be part of what is to come – but the more pressing question is whether the ministry can make its existing systems gel. As one person involved in contact tracing put it to me yesterday, the left hand too often has no clue what the right hand is doing.

Those, then, are the public health imperatives. They’re not the end of it, though. This is a political decision. As Ardern acknowledged yesterday, they will “look at the evidence of the effects of the measures on the economy and on society more broadly”. We live in a democracy. Blessedly, it’s a democracy deeply informed by expertise. But, thank god, it is not a technocracy. The idea that politics and public health are opposites is as silly as the binary fallacy whipped up in recent days of public health versus the economy. None of these things exists in a vacuum. Or a bubble.

Those considerations will include the number of businesses that are on the brink. The number of jobs at risk. But also the mood of the country. Since Ardern laid out the shape of life under alert level three, it’s been the talk of the two-metre-distanced supermarket queue. A lot of people are feeling knackered, wrung out, financially and emotionally, by the lockdown. For it to be described and delineated, and then denied, would be a psychological kick in the guts.

One of the areas in which New Zealand has outperformed much of the world – in the absence of sport there’s a culturally on-brand, if probably tasteless satisfaction in it – is in sticking to the programme. Polling by Stickybeak for The Spinoff shows an extraordinary 85% of New Zealanders back the government’s response – miles ahead of most of the world. That level of support is at the core of successfully implementing such draconian and strange restrictions on liberty. But it’s not set in stone. It stress-tests the social contract. Never in my lifetime has the cliché “you’ve got to bring the people with you” been more real.

Conveniently, or cleverly, the alert level three as laid out is hardly an invitation to a mosh pit. Physical distancing remains. Bubble life for most of us will be unchanged. It’s been called level four with KFC, and level three-and-three-quarters.

But it’s a step-change nevertheless. The opening of schools creates risks and confusion; like so many parts of this crisis, the pressure will be felt disproportionately by the underprivileged, and by Māori. The Early Childhood Education Council’s open letter to Ardern, published last night, pleads a reversal of the plan to reopen daycare centres under alert level three. There’s a lot yet to smooth out.

And even while many enterprises are clamouring to fire up again, some business commentators have said that as long as the strategy is elimination, we might as well be sure we’ve got it right. According to Andrew Bascand, speaking yesterday on Newstalk ZB, surveys in China are showing that enthusiasm for future travel to and trade with New Zealand has grown as a result of our response. In that light, “another week won’t make much difference”, he said.

Last Wednesday Grant Robertson, the finance minister and senior bubble attaché to the prime minister, addressed Business NZ. He trailed a shift from “essential” economic activity to “safe” economic activity under alert level three. He encouraged businesses to work quickly to establish ways to operate without contact – and with contact tracing.

That speech, via video conference, took place seven weeks and an eternity after his last. In late February, Robertson spoke at a crowded Auckland Chamber of Commerce lunch. He predicted a “short, sharp” hit to the New Zealand economy. He laid out three scenarios for the impact of the coronavirus on the New Zealand economy; in the worst of those, a global pandemic, “it may be necessary to consider immediate fiscal stimulus to support the economy as a whole and businesses and individuals through this period.” If only it were a matter of “stimulus” today.

Honestly, I remember less about what was said at that lunch than its circumstances. By chance I was sitting at a table less than two metres from where the finance minister was speaking. Spitting distance. The lunch was at the Pullman Hotel. Today, less than two months on, it is a quarantine facility for returning New Zealanders.

In the course of his speech last week, Robertson offered up the obligatory New Zealand sporting metaphor. “We can’t squander a good halftime lead by getting complacent.” To strain the analogy, we’re now in the last 10 minutes of the match, and it would be foolish to squander the lead.

Cabinet meets at 10.30 this morning. Ministers from Labour and from New Zealand First will study the advice of the director general of health, address the progress in the elimination strategy, debate the public appetite for an extension of the lockdown and the life-and-death stakes of the decision they are making. Several people will be told to unmute themselves so they can be heard.

Assuming the advice supports it, the best political decision – and it is our elected politicians’ decision to make – is to announce a short extension. To do so will cause many people real and tangible pain. To risk having to move out of alert level three and back into lockdown would cause pain, too, very likely more intense and long-lasting.

The public would likely tolerate a move to alert level three on Tuesday next week. Schools would get another six days, into early May, to steel themselves. But the end of lockdown would come directly after the observance of Anzac Day. After all, that’s only two trading days beyond midnight Wednesday. The elimination strategy gets a chance to take grip. The pace at which we return to a version of normality in alert level two accelerates. And the light at the end of the tunnel stays on.