NZ? On the main sequence, with only a small deviation that isn't strong evidence yet.
The 'main sequence' -- the thick line on
Covid Trends -- includes doubling every 2-10 days.
Last week? 500 confirmed cases. Overall? 800. That means
most of your cases where found in the last week. Which is a sign of exponential growth.
It does mean you are better at buying time than other countries. But if you double every week, after 3 months (13 weeks) you are at 6,400,000 cases - 2^13 times as many cases as 800. (and yes, the extrapolation will fail before then, as herd immunity starts kicking in the R0 falls as more and more of the people you would infect are already sick, dead or immune).
To extinguish it, you need to up your game. Because doubling every week delays the flood, it doesn't stop it.
The reason why delaying is worth it is that public health measures that do extinguish it take time to set up. You need millions of test kits and people able to use them, tech to do contact tracing at scale, and you need to start extinguishing it instead of slowing it.
SK had a bigger epidemic and did it. Get on it, or you are just delaying Italy (or worse, NYC) a few months.
Note that contact tracing doesn't have to be perfect. Your goal is to get R0 under 1. It normally has an R0 of around 2.5 and a cycle time of around 4 days (doubling every 3 days). Effective isolation slows this down to an R0 of 1.4 or so, so doubling every 8 days or so.
If your contract tracing lets you head off 1/2 of people infected before they in turn infect others, R0 falls to
0.7. And 0.7 means it is exponentially shinking.
If you have 10,000 infected, they infect 7000 over 4 days, they infect 5000 over 4 days, they infect 3500 over 4 days, they infect 2500 over 4 days, they infect 1700, they infect 1200, they infect 800, they infect 600, they infect 400, they infect 300, they infect 200, they infect, 140, they infect 100...
You still get another
20000 infected, but the epidemic extinguishes itself. And if you keep up the effort, your contract tracing starts getting better; your resources, originally stretched thin, start being able to choke it off faster.
TL;DR: nobody who hasn't done industrial-scale contract tracing and mass testing has beat this thing back. Seattle, NZ, almost everywhere except SK, China, Sinagpore and Taiwan -- you are buying time, but this isn't what victory looks like.