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Visitors allowed in Melbourne homes from 11.59pm on Tuesday, Premier says
By Kate Lahey and Zach Hope
Melburnians will be allowed to visit each other's homes from 11.59pm on Tuesday, Premier Daniel Andrews has announced.
With tight restrictions, people will now be allowed to socialise in homes with their friends and loved ones.
There will be a maximum of two adult visitors per house, per day, plus their dependent children, Mr Andrews said. Households will be restricted to one visiting event per day, meaning those who receive visitors cannot also visit someone else that day.
Mr Andrews said if one of his teenagers was to visit another home, that would count as a visit for his entire household.
"There's a thousand different options here, but ultimately, if you think about it, Grace goes and visits a friend. Grace comes home, we might as well all have gone and visited because Grace could be bringing the virus back into our house. That's the basic logic to it," he said.
For the second day in a row, Victoria has recorded a "doughnut" day of no new cases of coronavirus or deaths. The last time Victoria reported consecutive days of zero cases was March 5 and 6.
What we, all of us as Victorians, have built is a precious thing, but it is fragile.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews
The change to household visitors comes a day after the Premier announced businesses could reopen from 11.59pm on Tuesday, under the easing of stage four restrictions.
Mr Andrews urged Victorians to continue to get tested for even the mildest of symptoms.
"What we, all of us as Victorians, have built is a precious thing, but it is fragile," he said.
"We will be able to find a COVID-normal but we will all have to play our part in that and arguably there's nothing more important than going and getting tested."
The Premier said more than 3.081 million test results had been delivered since the start of the pandemic – more than 15,000 of them on Monday.
"Our testing performance over the last week and certainly the last fortnight has been nothing short of stunning," he said.
He said masks would remain mandatory to the end of the year and probably into 2021.
There are 87 active cases of COVID-19 in Victoria. Five Victorians are in hospital, one of them in intensive care.
"Even though we got zero cases, yesterday, today, if we're to stay on top of that then people need to ... get tested," Mr Andrews said.
"And get tested that day. Don't wait until tomorrow or two or three days."
Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said that while there would be future outbreaks, Victoria should be able to avoid another lockdown if everyone did the right thing.
"We can't control everything," he said. "And it absolutely depends on those individual behaviours. Because things can still run away from you, with all the best systems for response in the world, if no one turns up for testing, if no one isolates for days after becoming symptomatic," he said.
"You can't chase that with contact tracing. If people are out and exposing dozens and dozens of others when they're infectious, then you can never get ahead of that kind of a wildfire."
Premier Daniel Andrews, Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton and Health Minister Martin Foley arrive at Treasury Theatre on Tuesday.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
With retail and hospitality reopening, Mr Andrews said other workers, such as those usually in offices, should remain working from home.
"I know that's frustrating," Mr Andrews said. "I know that there are many businesses, large and small, who want to get their staff back on-site, but those environments at this stage are too risky."
Mr Andrews said there would be a "detailed advisory" about Halloween, masks in gyms and home businesses that would be published online on Tuesday afternoon.
He said work was happening behind the scenes on rolling out rapid testing, but he could not say when it would become widely available.
"It is not quite as accurate as the longer-form testing, if you like. But the turnarounds are really, really quick, and it can help just in getting ... more of a picture than no testing, in given settings," he said.
"It has been a feature of outbreak management in recent times. And it will continue to be."
Euan Wallace, the deputy secretary of case, contact and outbreak management at the Department of Health and Human Services, said on Tuesday that the recent outbreak in Melbourne's north reinforced the danger of family transmission.
"The lessons from the recent outbreak in the northern suburbs – but not just that outbreak, several other outbreaks over the last month or so – has been that intra-household and entire-household transmission has been one of the key methods of this virus spreading," he told ABC Radio National on Tuesday morning.
"So we need to just hold off on the massive family gatherings we all want to have just a bit longer."