Victoria has recorded a 26th consecutive day with no locally acquired cases of coronavirus, as the state shuts its border to Perth and two regions of WA.
Just one case of COVID-19 has been recorded in Victoria’s hotel quarantine in the 24 hours to Monday morning, following 10,604 tests.
There are now 21 active cases in the state, all of them in hotel quarantine.
It comes as the Victorian government declared the Perth metropolitan area, plus the Peel and South West regions a red zone after a hotel quarantine worker tested positive to COVID-19.
The new case has ended WA’s 10-month streak without community transmission and forced the regions into a five-day hard lockdown.
From 9pm on Sunday, anyone who has been in the red zone since January 25 cannot enter Victoria without an exception, exemption or worker permit.
Some 1700 people who have arrived in Victoria from the red zones since January 25 must be tested and isolate until they receive their result.
The rest of WA remains a green zone.
Victoria’s COVID-19 Testing Commander Jeroen Weimar said those who had arrived from WA in the past week will receive a text message urging them to get tested for the infection.
“If they don’t get tested, if we don’t see their test results come through, we’ll be chasing them down to make sure they do just that,” he told ABC Radio Melbourne.
“If we need to go knock on the doors, we’ll do just that.”
Mr Weimar said the Victorian community knows how to respond to COVID-19 outbreaks in other states.
“We did it with Brisbane, we’ve done it with NSW, we’re now going to do with WA,” he said.
Victorian health officials also continue to investigate a 30-year-old man and his close contacts after he returned a “weak positive” coronavirus test.
The alarm was raised when the man returned his test result on Saturday night, two days after he had tested negative.
The man and his close contacts are self-isolating.
Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Human Services has split into two new departments.
The new Department of Health and the new Department of Families, Fairness and Housing began operating from Monday.
The government has said the split will allow for a “dedicated focus on our health system and on the social recovery of our state” as it moves into the recovery phase of the pandemic.
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