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PREMIER Daniel Andrews has said he'll phone the mayor of Bendigo if needed, after she called for more specific information about COVID-19 cases in regional local government areas.
Cr Margaret O'Rourke said it would be helpful to know what suburb or cases were in, in municipal areas where a postcode might span a large area.
She suggested shopping precincts with confirmed cases also be identified.
Cr O'Rourke said people within the Bendigo region were asking for more information about exactly where cases were.
"When it comes to suburb, it makes it more real for people," she said.
"I think it means people will become more hyper vigilant."
Mr Andrews was unaware of the mayor's comments, which had been aired in the national media.
"I'm happy to look at those and if I need to give the mayor a call, I'm more than happy to do that," he said.
"We're always at our best when it comes to this fight when we're all working together as closely as possible.
"If there's anything we need to do there, then of course we would."
Mr Andrews believed the depth of information provided was dependent on the circumstances of the infection's acquisition.
"If you've caught it from someone in your household then we're not going to tell the world about your address and how you got it," he said.
"If you got it through an outbreak, then we report outbreaks - we speak to those all the time, and there's a media release that comes out from the Chief Health Officer each day and that, to the best of our ability, tries to go through all those outbreaks."
He said providing more detailed information might inadvertently lead to identification, in some cases.
"I would never want a situation where someone has second thoughts about getting tested because they ran the risk, particularly in a smaller community, of potentially it becoming known to the broader community that they've got it," Mr Andrews said.
"No-one should feel any stigma about this. It doesn't discriminate, there's not a sense of any blame or fault if you happen to get it, but you've got to be careful never to discourage people from getting tested, or ever having that sense that getting this virus is somehow a reflection on them and what they've done. You'd never want to do that."
Cr O'Rourke said she wasn't asking for specifics down to an individual level.
A response has been sought from the government.
Mr Andrews sought to reassure people about the information the government was making publicly available.
"I wouldn't want people to think there's a whole lot of stuff that should be getting done for public health purposes that isn't being done out of a sense of trying to be, like, a purist when it comes to people's privacy," he said during the press conference.
"We know what the priority is, and the priority is to get the health problem under control. Public health drives us."
Earlier
A MAN in his 20s is among the 14 Victorians to die from COVID-19 in the past 24 hours - the pandemic's youngest Australian victim to date.
It follows the death of a man in his 30s last week.
Twelve of the 14 new deaths were linked to COVID-19 outbreaks in aged care.
Premier Daniel Andrews told media on Friday the number of virus cases in the state's three largest regional centres, including Bendigo, were of concern.
A total of 492 confirmed COVID-19 cases are in regional Victoria.
Chief Health Officer, Professor Brett Sutton, said the origins of about one in five of the state's cases remained a mystery.
The proportion of mystery cases in regional areas could be lower - about 13 per cent.
Professor Sutton said the 13 per cent of mystery cases in regional Victoria was still of concern, representing possible community transmission in regional areas.
People between the ages of 20 - 29 were overrepresented among the state's mystery cases.
Professor Sutton said the strategy to drive down mystery cases was really about the restrictions.
The fewer opportunities people had to transmit the virus, the less transmissions would occur.
"What is notable is that it's plateaued in the last week or so," Professor Sutton said.
Mystery cases had plateaued, as well as new cases.
Professor Sutton said there was a need to dig down into every one of the cases in regional Victoria to see how many of the cases involved mystery transmissions.
He said contact tracers were seeking to identify not only contacts since cases had become symptomatic, but during the acquisition period.
The COVID-19 incubation period can be up to 14 days, though Professor Sutton said the majority of people developed symptoms in the first week - usually about five or six days in.
"There is a detailed process of not just figuring out close contacts while infectious but also that acquisition period.
"For one in five of those cases, we can't determine that," he said.
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