OPINION: Late one evening in early February I ran into a minister I hadn't seen in a while.

I asked him how he was and he said he was extremely worried, his tone slipping from the jocularity you would usually find past 10pm in the Beehive's bar.

"Coronavirus," he said, eyes widening. "If this gets bad we are going to take a wash."

Looking back this would have been a good time to do a lot of things. Switch out of my aggressive KiwiSaver fund. Stock up on flour. Start paying a whole lot more attention to a news story that had been festering in the background but not really front-of-mind.

But there are always a billion things going on in world politics. I lodged it in the "more important than you think" file of my mind and kept writing stories about the NZ First Foundation. After all, I wasn't a health reporter.

Dean Kozanic Another time, another crisis; Former prime Minister John Key, right, visited Christchurch after it's 7.1 magnitude earthquake in 2011,

In late-February I travelled to Fiji and Australia with the Prime Minister and things started to really heat up. A video of the Iranian deputy health minister wiping his brow in a press conference went viral. The case numbers rocketed up around the world. On the last day of the trip, fresh with adrenaline from dressing down Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on live TV, Jacinda Ardern strolled into a press pack and told us New Zealand had its first ever case of coronavirus. I typed "pm has confirmed it's coronagirus [sic]" into a work chatroom a few seconds later. Nothing has felt normal since.

Coronavirus took over all our lives eventually, but it did so at different speeds.

In early March my ex-girlfriend messaged me from New York to say she was worried she had the virus herself. Her mother suggested she move home to New Zealand, which I thought seemed alarmist. This changed as she started messaging me increasingly panicked statistics about the death rate in New York, the sirens she could hear throughout the night, and the refrigerated trucks for collecting corpses her colleague had seen.

Other friends around the world started to weigh up the price of returning immediately or opting to stay whereever they were, worried that getting home was only going to get harder. Everyone was making more and more jokes about another recession, the second to hit millenials in my working life. Media companies were asking their employees to use up all their leave, or to take voluntary pay cuts.

Social media gave New Zealand a strange week or so where day-to-day life was normal, but the screens that dominate life were anything but. Everywhere I went online was dominated with horrific stories out of Italy or the US, or office workers complaining about how hard it was to work from home. Meanwhile we were still going to bars, to the movies, to work every day.

POOL VISION Covid-19 daily briefing on April 8, with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Dr Ashley Bloomfield.

Two days before one of my flatmates was due to move to Melbourne, Australia and New Zealand shut their borders to each other. He applied for his old job back at a cafe that would only remain open for another week. The security blanket most young people in New Zealand have had for years - that you can always move somewhere else and start again - had evaporated. I remembered just days before a conversation I had with someone in Government, who had told me that shutting the border to Australia was basically unthinkable, given 6000 or so people arrived here from Australia every day. If it was that bad there, we'd probably just have to accept that it would get pretty bad here too.

As we moved towards lockdown my personal and professional lives completely blurred. I took twenty minutes out of a workday to buy three bottles of gin at a liquor store, lest I be forced to drink supermarket booze for weeks. I read the famed Imperial College paper, which forecast either hundreds of thousands of deaths or over a year of lockdowns, and stopped sleeping for longer than an hour or so at a time. Like most people my age I still felt basically invincible myself, but that seemed to make me even more of a disease vector - someone who might infect and kill my quite-old parents, or my flatmate with asthma.

I live in a seven-bedroomed house with six other people, giving me a much larger bubble than most. The kitchen, under strain at the best of times, has buckled under the cumulative weight of us all making three meals a day at home, plus endless loaves of bread. Living with this many people means enough different conversations every day - enough different people to drink a lot of wine with - that I almost feel like I have a social life. For the first few days it reminded me of a holiday away together, like we were all hanging out in one place 24/7 because we actually wanted to. This didn't last.

I still get some freedom because I'm still allowed to go to the daily press conferences the prime minister has, sitting at least two seats away from my colleagues in the dim comfort of the Beehive theatrette.

Kiwis are used to seeing the theatrette on the news, and reporters are used to experiencing history in there. It's where Jacinda Ardern and John Key started to publicly grapple with the massive death tolls from the twin disasters that hit Christchurch over the last decade, where Key resigned from power and where Winston Peters gave Ardern the power she now has.

Dom Thomas/RNZ National Party leader Simon Bridges is chairing tEpidemic Response Committee, which is standing in for the whole of Parliament during the crisis

But the public aren't used to seeing how the sausage of the news gets made in there, not on this scale. Since the daily press conferences have begun Kiwis have been tuning in to watch or listen to the entire thing as if it was a daily episode of television, replete with audience favourites like Ashley Bloomfield - and enemies like Newshub's Tova O'Brien.

The problem with this is that press conferences are not meant to be TV shows. They lack narrative form. Topics change from minute-to-minute, as does the mood. A moment of laughter follows swiftly after sternness. Questions are asked over and over again in the often-vain hope that politicians might answer them properly, or at least in the kind of sentence you can clip out and put in the news easily.

This had led to a 24/7 barrage of emails, texts, and tweets about how reporters are doing their jobs wrong. Some of them make valid points, some of them just find the format of adversarial press conferences impolite, most have some kind of partisan axe to grind.

AP When news of a virus in Wuhan started filtering through, we didn't know how much it would change our lives.

I used to think that Chinese curse - "may you live in interesting times" - didn't apply to journalists. Interesting times are what we are built for. Then March 15 happened. Now this. There still is a sort of morbid exhilaration you get, sitting in the room as the Prime Minister announces a quasi-police state, a childlike awe for the power of the state once things really get bad. But you stop being able to turn off. I get home and just try to catch up on all the news I missed while I was writing it. As with March 15, I find filtering the horrible events through the filter of a news story that I am writing the best way to numb myself to their power. If you have to sit back and think about the world shutting all its borders for years to come, of a recession deeper than any we've felt in a century, of needless deaths if we don't resist all the things that make us feel alive, then it all gets a bit much. When you get to write it out as a news story its just data to feed into a well-worn formula, a coping mechanism that also happens to be your job.