• Victoria will enter a snap five-day lockdown from midnight tonight, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has announced.
• The state will be under stage four restrictions, as it was in Melbourne earlier in the year.
• Victorians must remain within five kilometres of their home, and can only leave their home for four reasons.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

The entirety of Victoria will enter a five-day “circuit-breaker” lockdown at midnight tonight, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews announced on Friday afternoon.

For five days, Victoria will be subject to stage four restrictions, as it was in Melbourne’s prolonged lockdown earlier in the year. Non-essential business will close, people will only be allowed within 5 kilometres of their home, and asks will be mandatory everywhere.

As with the earlier lockdown, there are only four valid reasons for Victorians to leave home: shopping for essentials, caregiving, exercise, and work and study which cannot be completed at home. Weddings are not permitted, and funerals are limited to 10 people.

Schools will close, but childcare and early childhood centres will remain open.

“I am sad to have to report, it is the advice to me that we must assume that there are further cases in the community than we have positive results for, and that it is moving at a velocity that has not been seen anywhere in our country over the course of these last 12 months,” the Premier said.

The announcement comes after the Victorian health department reported five new cases of COVID-19 in the community on Friday morning, bringing the total number of active cases in the state to 13. One of the cases spent over eight hours at an airport cafe at Melbourne Airport on Tuesday.

Andrews said that the UK COVID-19 variant presents unique problems for the state.

“We have talked about this for a long time, because it is so hyper-infectious, and moves so fast, that it is presenting a very, very real challenge to our status, our stay-safe, stay-open, our precious thing that we’ve built – all of us – throughout 2020,” he said.

“I am confident that this short, sharp circuit breaker will be effective,” Andrews said. “We will be able to smother this.”

At a press conference on Friday morning, Prime Minister Scott Morrison flagged his support for a “proportionate response” to the Victorian outbreak.

“So a proportionate response by the Victorian Government, which I understand from what we’ve been hearing this morning, a proportionate response that enables the tracers and others to be able to get on top of it and get the same successful result we have seen in other states,” he said.

The Age reported that Melbourne federal MPs were strongly advised this morning to get to Canberra before midnight, to dodge a possible lockdown.

Due to the fact one of the exposure sites was a terminal at Melbourne Airport, NSW Health is now contacting approximately 7,000 people who entered NSW from Victoria, and urging anyone who was in the Jetstar terminal from 4:45am – 2pm on 9 February to isolate and get tested.

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