The Premier on Tuesday confirmed not all of the planned easing of restrictions would proceed in their entirety, saying it was “not safe or fair”.
Mr Andrews said coronavirus cases numbers were too high to open up now.
“That is a fact,” he said.
“That is based on the best of public health advice. And if people find fault with that, well, that’s fine.
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READ NOW“But the public health advice to me, from a learned team of experts, is that it is too high at the moment to open.”
Mr Andrews said if Melbourne opened up now, the city would only be open for a short period of time before rising cases would shut the city down again.
“That is not the strategy. That’s not what people want. It’s not what I’m prepared to settle for,” Mr Andrews said.
“Everything people have given has to count for something. And it will count for a lot more if we see this thing through for a few more weeks and then take safe steps when they’re safe to be taken and not taken now because we all let our frustration get the better of us.”
Victoria recorded 12 new virus cases on Tuesday, with Melbourne’s all-important 14-day average continuing to tick upwards to 10.
Health authorities have said the 14-day average had to be about five for the government to consider easing restrictions on October 19.
“Those that are safe, we will proceed with,” Mr Andrews said.
“There may be some others that we believe are safe that were not necessarily foreshadowed at that time.
“This is a changing thing. I know that’s frustrating, that not all questions can be answered, and not all certainties can be provided but at the end of the day we’re not in a position to go as far and as fast as we wanted to, but there are some things we can safely do.”
Chief health officer Brett Sutton said the remaining chains of transmission in Victoria were some of the trickiest in the world.
Prof Sutton said although New South Wales again recorded more than virus cases than Victoria on Tuesday, the circumstances were very different.
“If we had started with a few days cases that were not really complex households, that were not really challenging circumstances, we might have been able to approach this very differently,” he said.
“What we had was 20,000 cases over several weeks that have come down to a low level.”
Prof Sutton assured Victorians the road map to reopening was the light at the end of the tunnel and health authorities were reviewing the case numbers every single day.
jack.paynter@news.com.au