Melbourne, some regional areas to re-enter lockdown after 191 new coronavirus cases

Melbourne and some towns in regional Victoria have been ordered back into lockdown for six weeks from midnight on Wednesday after the state recorded 191 new cases of COVID-19.

As The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald revealed earlier on Tuesday, schools in affected areas will delay reopening their doors again for term three as planned on Monday, with hundreds of thousands of children potentially facing a return to distance learning, except for senior secondary students and special schools.

Stage three restrictions will come into effect for metropolitan Melbourne and the Mitchell Shire, which takes in towns including Broadford, Kilmore, Seymour, Tallarook, Pyalong and Wallan, north of the state’s capital.

Residents in those areas will be barred from leaving their homes for any purpose other than work, food, exercise, or medical care.

The Mornington Peninsula is within the boundary of metropolitan Melbourne and will be included in the lockdown zone, although Geelong is not.

People in the lockdown zones are expected to stay at their principal place of residence for the duration of the six-week lockdown and not travel to holiday homes or second homes in regional areas.

"These are unsustainably high numbers of new cases," Premier Daniel Andrews said. "We know we're on the cusp of something very, very bad if we don't take these steps today."

He said it would be impossible to continue contact tracing at a sufficient level to suppress and contain the virus.

Without a widespread lockdown, the virus "will quickly spiral well and truly out of control", the Premier said.

"We have to be realistic about the circumstances we confront ... this is not over. A sense of complacency has crept into us ... each of us knows someone who has not been following the rules as well as they should have."

Retail businesses will remain open subject to density limits, markets can open for food and drink sales only, and hairdressers will be allowed to remain open.

Restaurants and cafes must return to takeaway and delivery services only, while beauty and nail salons will be forced to close as will entertainment and cultural venues.

People will not be allowed any visitors to their homes and public gatherings will be restricted to two people outside your household.

Victoria's Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton said the lockdown was required to avoid thousands of new cases per day and "absolutely catastrophic outcomes".

"I know that we will already see deaths from the cases that have already. What I do not want to see is any more deaths than are already predicted," he said.

Number plate recognition used to police Melbourne's boundary

Limits will apply to people's daily exercise in the lockdown zone.

"You cannot leave metropolitan Melbourne to get your daily exercise. You can't be going on a four-hour bushwalk, hundreds of kilometres away from Melbourne. You can't be going fishing outside a metropolitan area down into regional Victoria," Mr Andrews said.

"Regional Victoria has very, very few cases and vast parts of regional Victoria have no cases. This is designed to keep it that way."

Numberplate recognition technology will be used by police to ensure people are not travelling into regional Victoria for non-essential reasons.

The "hard boundary", as Mr Andrews described it, will be manned by police and 260 Australian Defence Force troops.

Mr Andrews said checkpoints similar to booze buses will be set up at points along the perimeter, similar to the way the borders of the 12 locked down postcodes have been patrolled over the past week.

CHO surprised at school outbreaks

School holidays will be pushed out by a week to allow teachers and schools to prepare for the possibility of another stint of distance learning, except for year 11 and 12 students and year 10 students who are doing VCE subjects.

Special schools, which had difficulty during the last period of remote learning, will return to face-to-face learning as planned next week.

Professor Sutton said he was surprised to see so many cases in schools.

"The great majority of cases that turned up in those schools were from kids who acquired it at home, or acquired it outside of school and then been subsequently identified, and the schools closed as a result," he said.

"Al-Taqwa college [in suburban Truganina] is probably a different example. There seems to have been transmission in the school that was quite substantial."

How 'rule-breakers' spread the virus in Melbourne

The Premier said a sense of complacency had contributed to the spread of the virus across Melbourne.

"We have to a certain extent allowed our frustration to get the better of us and that means that regardless of what the index case is, regardless of who patient zero is and how they became infected, the virus then spreads," Mr Andrews said.

"I'll take you back to an example: a person gets infected, they're in a family of six, or seven or eight or even 10 people, they then go home, they’re unwell. They don’t get tested for quite some time. They’re wildly infectious, they go and visit other families.

"Small, large, north, south, doesn’t matter where it happened, but all of a sudden you have a virus out there and it runs so quickly that even the delay in taking a test and getting it processed is enough to see a doubling and a doubling again."

The Premier added: "The mildness of it, that's the real devil to it. The fact that so many people can have it and not even feel unwell or if they do, the symptoms are so mild that they’re not a prompt to go and get tested.

"This is binary. It is life and death ... And I don’t want to hear any more of this stuff from younger people or from otherwise healthy people regardless of their age, that 'it won’t affect me'. Well, it will, it will affect you."

Crisis cabinet meeting

Mr Andrews gathered his crisis cabinet in Melbourne on Tuesday morning to discuss the escalating second coronavirus surge which has now spread beyond the state’s capital and into its regions.

The latest figure of 191 new cases was enough to convince the Premier and his colleagues to push forward with the drastic new restrictions.

There are now 772 active cases of the deadly virus in Victoria, with about 438 of them attributed to community transmission.

Of the 191 new cases reported on Tuesday, 154 are still under investigation, with just 37 linked back to known outbreaks and none associated with returned travellers in hotel quarantine.

There were no new deaths overnight, with the state’s death toll at 22, but the number of people in intensive care has almost doubled within a day, from five to nine.

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