Regional Victoria to be released from hard lockdown from tonight

With no exposure sites and no positive wastewater detections outside Melbourne, 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.

"This 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 localization 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."

Victoria Police will be enforcing the rules.

Fines of up to $1800 for an individual and $10,000 for a business will apply for those in breach of the rules.

"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, we will be relying on them as we have in the past to be establishing the address of any customers," Premier Andrews said.

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.

From 11.59pm tonight the five reasons to leave home will be lifted and there will be no limit on the distance regional Victorians can travel.

Regional Victorians will only be able to travel to Melbourne for a permitted reason.

Private gatherings in the home are still not permitted but outdoor gatherings in public spaces can have up to 10 people.

Face masks will still be mandatory indoors and outdoors.

Food and hospitality will open for seated service only with density rules of one per four square metres and a maximum of 100 people per venue.

Venues smaller than 100 sqm can have up to 25 people before density rules apply.

Retail, personal services such as beauty and tattooing can reopen.

Religious gatherings a ceremonies are allowed with density rules and no more than 100 people indoors and 300 outdoors per venue.

Weddings and funerals can have 50 people per venue.

Community sport is open for all ages but spectators are not permitted.

Entertainment venues can have up to 300 people per outdoor space with density rules and a cap of 100 people indoors.

Premier Andrews acknowledged the growing community fatigue around lockdowns, which will have to be a feature of life until up 70 to 80 per cent of the population are vaccinated.

"We're all sick of it, but this is the only option we have," he said.

"That's not just my view, that's the view of every leader across our country and the view of every public health expert across the country; if you let this run, then there will be not 11 cases it'll be thousands of cases.

"Our hospitals will be full of COVID patients and anyone else beyond COVID who needs anything like an ICU bed for a heart attack or stroke or a car accident, they won't get it."

The decision to release regional Victorians from harsh lockdown has been welcomed by residents and businesses alike.

On Monday, The Standard's readers celebrated the news, particularly given the south-west hasn't recorded a positive COVID-19 case since September last year.

Victoria has recorded 11 new locally acquired cases of COVID-19 overnight from over 38,000 tests.

Another 17,101 people were vaccinated for the virus.

The new locally-acquired cases are all 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.

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