Economists are moving to revise their forecasts as the coronavirus continues to spread around the globe, and New Zealand can expect more revisions as the public health emergency continues to develop and evolve.
ANZ chief economist Sharon Zollner told TVNZ1's Q+A it's a rapidly changing situation that has gone from affecting a few specific sectors to something "much broader".
With a Government stimulus package on the horizon for May, Ms Zollner told host Jack Tame that due to the exponential nature of the global effects of coronovirus, May is "a very very long time away" and she expects a "sharp growth slowdown in our trading partners at the very least".
"That is a shock we've seen before and we know how it feeds through and it doesn't tend to go very well and typically the Government does need to step up," she says.
Ms Zollner said in the scenario where people may be staying at home and working from home more, the question is how to stimulate the economy.
"I think for these sorts of shocks where you know they could be quite nasty but they should be fairly short, the focus needs to be on helping the businesses that are sound to get though what is essentially a period of potentially extreme disruption.
"The tax system - you can defer provisional tax, that kind of thing, you could lower tax rates but it's very difficult to reverse that sort of thing."
Relative to other countries, Ms Zollner said New Zealand's debt is extremely low and well-placed for a worse-case scenario.
Health Minister David Clark told Q+A's Jack Tame that he expects more isolated cases of Covid-19, but community spread isn’t inevitable.
"Overall as a nation that gives us options that many other countries would love to have," she says.
"We've also got a freely-floating exchange rate which typically in times of global trouble drops through the floor and delivers a really meaningful monetary easing.
"Not so clear that will happen this time because it's not clear that New Zealand is actually worse off in this kind of shock, but typically that's a really important shock absorber."
While the coronovirus impact has brought a clear "export shock", Ms Zollner told Jack Tame the spread may affect the hospitality and tourism sector.
"We import more intermediates and capital goods from China than we do consumption goods," she says, highlighting the building, manufacturing and farming sectors as potentially at risk from the hold-up stemming from China's logistic chain freeze.
Ms Zollner said the Government's policy response will need to be "unusual, because it is unlike any shock we have seen before".
"We haven't got a lot of time to sit back and think about this because the impacts are hitting much more quickly than we normally think about things in a macro-economic sense."
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