Regional Victoria will be released from hard lockdown from midnight on Monday August 9, but some rules remain.
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While Victoria recorded 11 new locally acquired cases of COVID-19 overnight from over 38,000 tests, there were no exposure sites and no positive wastewater detections outside Melbourne.
As such, premier Daniel Andrews said on Monday the regions would be released from the strict rules.
"This is a good day for regional Victoria," he said.
"That is a very important decision one that's made on the best of health advice and one that is fundamentally the function of not having cases in regional Victoria. That's very important.
"We do have a conservative approach to these things we don't want this virus to spread. But this is very positive news and speaks to the fact that we do have a degree of containment around these cases, there is a degree of localisation if you like to these cases and pleasingly we haven't seen cases in regional Victoria over these last four or five days, so I'm sure that'll be welcome news to to every single regional Victorian just on enforcement."
Victoria Police will be out in force enforcing the rules.
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"I would ask people to use common sense and good judgment, don't travel to regional Victoria unless you need to, and indeed retailers and other other businesses who are providing goods and services will be relying on them as we have in the past, to be establishing the address of any customers."
People from regional Victoria can travel through Melbourne to get to another part of regional Victoria
The regions will revert back to the rules applied late last week in regional Victoria.
These include:
- Private gatherings in the home are still not permitted, however, outdoor gatherings in public spaces can occur with up to 10 people.
- Face masks will also still be mandatory indoors and outdoors.
- Food and hospitality will open for seated service only, a density requirement of 1 person per 4sqm will apply, with a maximum of 100 people per venue.
- Venues smaller than 100sqm can have up to 25 people before density requirements apply.
- Retail can also open and personal services such as beauty and tattooing can resume. Face masks can be removed where required for the service to be performed.
- Religious gatherings and ceremonies are allowed, with density requirements of 1 person per 4sqm, and no more than 100 people total indoors and 300 people outdoors per venue.
- Weddings and funerals are also able to have up to 50 people at a venue. This limit doesn't include infants under 12 months of age, or the people required to conduct the service.
- Community sport is open for all ages, including training and competition. Only the minimum number of participants (players, coaches, referees, officials, and carers or parents) needed to train or compete are permitted to attend, subject to a density quotient of 1 person per 4 sqm. Spectators are not permitted.
- Entertainment venues can have up to 300 people per outdoor space with a density requirement of 1 person per 4 sqm and a cap of 100 people per space indoors.
There will no longer be only five reasons to leave home.
Of the 11 new cases, all were linked, and one has been in quarantine throughout their infectious period.
The recent cases take the total active cases to 103.
That included 29 cases publicly confirmed on Saturday and another 11 on Sunday.
All of those people were in Melbourne but they were also infectious while out in the community.
Authorities are yet to establish what caused several regional wastewater testing sites to ping including in Healesville and Benalla.
The sites detected fragments of coronavirus.
