Victoria will advance contact trace hotel quarantine staff as part of efforts to avoid a repeat of the state's devastating coronavirus second wave.
Premier Daniel Andrews has revealed some features of the state's revamped hotel quarantine program for international arrivals, which will resume on December 7.
"We'll have an exclusive workforce. They can only work for us - they won't have any second jobs," the premier told the ABC on Wednesday.
"We may well have ... some staff members who live at the actual hotel, a bit of a fly-in, fly-out type arrangement.
"We'll advance contact trace all those staff, so we know who they live with, what the people they live with do for a living - so we don't have someone sharing a house, for instance, with someone who works in an aged care facility.
The program will cater for 160 returning travellers per day, or 1100 per week.
Victoria's botched hotel quarantine program was primarily responsible for the second wave that forced Melbourne into a 112-day lockdown.
A judicial inquiry into the program has handed down its interim findings and will issue its final report by December 21.
The inquiry was told the program was responsible for more than 17,000 infections and 750 of Victoria's 809 deaths.
Mr Andrews also is confident the state's revamped contact tracing system, heavily-criticised during the second wave, will cope with future outbreaks.
"If you had as many cases as we had, any contact tracing system will be fundamentally overwhelmed," he said.
"There are many countries around the world that stopped contact tracing when they get more than 50 cases a day.
"We've made steady and consistent improvements."
Health Minister Martin Foley doubts Victoria has eradicated coronavirus, despite 26 days without any new cases.
Victoria also no longer has any active cases and its last deaths from the virus were on October 28.
On Wednesday morning, Queensland confirmed it would reopen the border with Victoria on December 1, the same as SA, while the NSW-Victoria border reopened at midnight on Monday.
But Mr Foley said the goal remains suppression of the virus, not eradication.
"The way in which this highly infectious virus spreads and the way in which so many people who can be positive but show no symptoms of the virus makes us all work on the basis that it is still out there," he said.
"We support, totally, the national cabinet position of seeking to suppress, and manage the virus.
"And that continues to be our position. I don't think, heart of hearts, that we have eliminated the virus."
Testing numbers also are healthy, with 16,409 in the previous 24 hours to Wednesday morning.
Mr Foley said follow-up testing to positive sewage results in Portland, Benalla and Altona had revealed no more cases and they appeared to be periodic shedding.
"That's an excellent sign," he said.
