New Zealanders will be allowed to return home from Melbourne on special "green flights" from midnight on Tuesday, despite ongoing lockdowns and community outbreaks in Victoria.
New Zealander Tony Blakely is an epidemiologist based in the thick of it, in Melbourne.
He says the stakes are particularly high because the state is battling to trace multiple clusters and has detected the more infectious delta-variant, which has spread rapidly through India and the UK.
Blakely spoke to Guyon Espiner.