The Victorian Chief Health Officer has been urged to create consistency in agreed 'border region' communities so businesses don't suffer unnecessarily.
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Wodonga Council chief executive Mark Dixon responded to a tweet by the Victorian CHO Brett Sutton which congratulated Melbourne residents pictured in a park on their social distancing.
"Albury Wodonga has 40,000 wearing masks with restricted business operations and across the river another 40,000 with no masks and open business, constant free flow of people in between and no COVID. Can you consider one consistent community approach inside agreed border bubbles?" Mr Dixon said in the tweet.
Mr Dixon told The Border Mail it was great that Wodonga residents could travel to Albury, but naturally it would result in business lost south of the border.
"I'm obviously concerned about Wodonga businesses, particularly the hospitality ones and allowing them to operate on a level playing field - that's really important for the city," he said.
"The good work that was done between the two states on creating the border bubble could be applied to a zone that is COVID-free.
"Where you can go on one side and not wear a mask with many people in a venue, appropriately operating under a COVID-safe plan, certainly with the best intentions people in Wodonga will migrate to Albury.
"They [Wodonga businesses] are restricted to a maximum of 20 people, when their counterparts in Albury are operating with much more people.
"It's unfair on those businesses."
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Dr Sutton described the risk of COVID-19 from regional Victoria to other states as "negligible", in answering whether states should open their borders to regional Victorians like the Northern Territory.
"I think they'll [the other states] come to their judgement when they feel that's appropriate for them, and every jurisdiction will have its own threshold for what they regard as reasonable, but there's no question that regional Victoria's at a point where we're down to three active cases and it will be fewer and fewer over time, fingers-crossed," he said.
"So It would be a very reasonable judgement to say that the risk in regional Victoria going interstate is negligible."
Dr Sutton asked why the restrictions on regional Victoria were warranted, given the low active cases.
"The settings that we have in regional Victoria really relate to what the transmission potential is if a new case were introduced there," he said.
"If you have no restrictions, for example, it's not inconceivable that in the next week or two ... regional Victoria could have one or two active cases. But if the settings allow for dozens and dozens of interactions for anyone, then an infectious case has dozens and dozens of interactions.
"That is what leads to that exponential growth in cases."
