A new COVID-19 situation report from the World Health Organization (WHO) shows New Zealand's still doing better than most of the world at containing coronavirus, despite our recent outbreak.
While there is widespread concern new cases in south Auckland could indicate we're about to see a second wave of COVID-19, the total number of community transmission figures sits at just 17 for now.
And despite an escalation in alert levels being an inconvenience for Kiwis, new data and charts from the WHO's latest global coronavirus report show there are worse places than New Zealand to be holed up during the pandemic.
One map, displaying how many cases of COVID-19 were reported in each country last week, shows New Zealand was in the minority of territories that had reported less than 100 cases between August 6-12.
While not quite as impressive as the likes of Mongolia and Greenland, who haven't seen any new cases in that period, we're still doing much better than large swaths of Europe, Asia and the Americas - most of the countries in which have seen at least 1000 new cases this week.
The map shows that Russia, Kazakhstan, France, Spain, Indonesia, Argentina, Colombia and a handful of other territories have all recorded more than 10,000 cases over the seven-day period.
Meanwhile the US, Brazil and India - the three nations with the highest total number of coronavirus cases across the globe - are still struggling to contain the spread of the virus. The trio were the only nations the world over to record more than 100,000 cases in the last week.
New Zealand's successes are reflected in the entire Western Pacific region, whose countries - barring the Philippines with 139,538 cases - have all seen less than 100,000 COVID-19 cases since the start of the pandemic, despite being home to 1.9 billion people.
The Western Pacific region has only recorded 383,000 cases and 8911 deaths from COVID-19 - well behind the likes of South-East Asia (2.8 million cases, 55,564 deaths), Europe (3.6 million cases, 217,716 deaths) and the Americas (10.8 million cases, 393,727 deaths).
China, where the disease is believed to have originated from, recorded less than 1000 cases over the last seven days, while Australia tipped over 1000 as it battles to contain its troublesome outbreak in Victoria.
Time will tell whether New Zealand will, like Australia, see another major outbreak of coronavirus on our shores. As it stands, the WHO categorises our transmission type as 'cluster of cases', indicating "cases, clustered in time, geographic location and/or by common exposures".
On Tuesday, New Zealand's 102-day streak without a case of community transmission was broken when it was revealed four people from the same south Auckland family had contracted the disease.
Auckland's was escalated to COVID-19 alert level 3 at midday on Wednesday in response, with the rest of the country moving to alert level 2.
Auckland's level 3 lockdown is scheduled to end at midnight on Friday, but Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has not ruled out extending it further if required.
