Instead, by Friday afternoon, 65 people have died. The number of patients requiring mechanical ventilation stood at 42 on Thursday. Thousands of intensive care beds, equipped with mechanical ventilators, stand blessedly empty in hospital wards around the country, braced for the wave that has not come. So where are we? "What we want to do now," federal Health Minister Greg Hunt told reporters on Monday, is "consolidate the containment, we want to work towards an effective eradication. Scott Morrison is now able to point towards a three-pronged strategy to scale down restrictions. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen "We can never guarantee that absolutely, but we want to work towards that effective eradication. At the same time, we have also been planning the road out." Seems straightforward. The control and suppression has been so effective that the new aim is to continue until the virus is eliminated. This also happens to be New Zealand's stated aim.

And, on Thursday, Morrison emerged from a meeting of the national cabinet to announce to a press conference how the next phase would be pursued. The baseline restrictions on movement would be maintained for the next four weeks. In that time, three key capabilities would be ramped up, summarised as "test, trace, isolate" to aggressively seek and destroy new localised outbreaks.

"If we are going to move to an environment where there are fewer restrictions then you need these three things in place," Morrison said. "That," says the man credited with persuading NZ to embrace elimination, Professor Michael Baker, "sounds exactly like an elimination strategy to me." But not according to Morrison. At his Thursday press conference, he said that Australia was continuing with suppression. "We are not in an eradication mode." Why not aim for eradication, asked a reporter, if it's all going so well? It could happen as a "byproduct" Morrison conceded. "But the eradication pathway involves an approach which would see even more economic restrictions than are currently in place." Morrison waxed lyrical for a moment on the importance of staying in the "groove of Australian ethos" and Australian's great love of freedom and barbecues, as if to suggest the Kiwis are somehow partial to repression, maybe the odd bit of police brutality, and prefer their snags raw. He concluded by saying "we are not looking to copy anyone".

It's true that the NZ restrictions are tighter than Australia's on some measures. For instance, all schools are closed and learning is done online. Even many food retailers, like butchers, are shut.

But the restrictions are broadly similar. You can go to the park for exercise but the gyms are closed. You can shop for groceries and pharmaceuticals but don't leave home unnecessarily. Work from home if you can but go to work if you must. "Your lockdown is not as intense as ours," says Baker, professor of public health at NZ's Otago University. "But we are pretty much in sync – except maybe haircuts. It always amuses us that you can get a haircut in Australia. We are all getting quite shaggy." Loading His big chance may be approaching. After successfully limiting its outbreak, NZ is due to consider easing its level four lockdown to level three in the next few days. Baker, a member of the NZ government's technical advisory group on COVID-19, understands why Morrison mightn't want to declare eradication. "Our politicians didn't want to use the 'elimination' word for a while because it sounds too absolute." "I really understand not wanting to apply an absolute," Baker says. "In fact, the definition of 'elimination' allows for failure – as long as it's controlled."

And that is precisely the point of the three-part system that Morrison has set out as a prerequisite for easing restrictions. The more rigorous program of intensified testing, tracing and isolating is designed to find and crush any new outbreak before it can become a second wave. What does Australia's Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy, have to say on this? After listening to Morrison reject "eradication" on Thursday, Murphy said: "We are on the same trajectory as NZ, which is aiming for eradication, and if we achieve complete lack of transmission and no cases that would be great," said Murphy. Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy is circumspect about the ultimate goal. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen "Essentially there is not a lot of difference between an aggressive suppression strategy and an eradication strategy, with the exception that we don't feel the need to hold the country very seriously in lockdown until we have no cases. But if that happens, with the measures we are doing now, that would be fantastic." It verges on being a distinction without a meaningful difference. Indeed, in the official statement published by the Australian national cabinet on Thursday, it commits that "Australia will continue to progress a successful suppression/elimination strategy".

So why does Morrison go to such trouble to resist using the words "elimination" or "eradication"? If the national cabinet, his own health minister and public health experts are happy enough to embrace elimination, or a variation such as Hunt's "effective eradication", why not the Prime Minister? It serves a political purpose. He can tell the Coalition's political tribe that he's different to NZ's Jacinda Ardern, a Labor prime minister. He's not some kind of Kiwi collectivist, he seems to be implying. She may be some kind of fanatic who enjoys shutting down the economy, but Morrison is not. Loading Does it matter in the real world? Yes, it does. Once the virus is effectively eliminated, NZ Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters has raised the possibility of Australia and NZ, while keeping their borders closed to the rest of the world, opening to each other. Peters describes it as a "trans-Tasman bubble" that would allow the two nations to trade and travel freely with each other even as the rest of the world remains too dangerous. Ardern added: "Both [Australia and NZ] have the same goal in mind at the moment – get it under control in our own countries and then we can talk about together what we’re able to achieve."

Morrison's response was to say that no border changes with NZ were under contemplation, then added: "Our measures have largely mirrored each other, NZ decided to go a lot further but I’d note that the outcomes we are getting are actually on a per capita basis actually better than what is happening in NZ, that is not a criticism that is just to say that while following different practices, where we’ve pitched it has managed to get as good if not a better outcome." It seems more important to Morrison to maintain a difference rather than to find common cause. Which is, of course, entirely his choice. But if fortune has presented the Prime Minister with the opportunity to establish total victory over the epidemic without needing any further restrictions, perhaps he should embrace his luck. Loading Just as Morrison appears to have embraced the opportunity presented to him by the Reserve Bank governor, Philip Lowe. The Prime Minister said that Lowe had given the national cabinet a briefing on Thursday with "a very clear message": "If you think you can grow the economy under the old settings then we need to think again." Morrison, who to now has resisted any proposals for economic reform, seized the moment: "On the other side of the virus," he said, "any sense of business-as-usual when it comes to the policy frameworks that we had prior to the election will need to be reconsidered on the other side to ensure that we can achieve the growth that will be necessary in our economy to get people back into work, to get our economy back on track."

Unexpectedly, the coronavirus, despite its shockingly high costs in lives and livelihoods, is presenting opportunities for Australia. Opportunities for outstanding success in public health, and opportunities for economic rejuvenation. Like most of the world, Australia is down on its luck. If federal and state governments can seize the moment, perhaps the country can make some new luck. Peter Hartcher is political editor. Sign up for our Coronavirus Update newsletter Get our Coronavirus Update newsletter for the day’s crucial developments at a glance, the numbers you need to know and what our readers are saying. Sign up to The Sydney Morning Herald’s newsletter here and The Age’s here.