“No doubt about it, that is difficult. But by the same token we need to be sure we don’t have another round, we don’t have another spread of this infectious disease getting out of control in our community,” he said.

“We know how easily it can happen, we know what the community has gone through.”

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Premier Daniel Andrews has said in recent months that Victoria’s upgraded contact tracing processes now rival NSW’s contact tracing as the best in the country. Yet Victoria has imposed tougher travel restrictions than NSW, where visitors from WA can enter but must get tested and isolate until they receive a negative result.

Mr Donnellan, when asked if immediately making Perth, south-west Western Australia and the Peel region a “red zone” was a measured and proportionate response, said there was still much that the Western Australian government was scrambling to discover about the outbreak.

“That’s what they’re assessing at the moment and once they provide us certainty with their assessment of how many cases they’ve got, their level of community transmission, then we will review that,” he said.

“But let me be clear, we don’t want to be in a position where we are bringing coronavirus back into the state after the hard work the community’s done to get on top of it.”

Mr Donnellan said the government was contacting people already in Victoria who had visited the affected Western Australian areas since January 25, aided by the permit system that requires everyone entering Victoria to register their personal details.

“It is a tracking system in a sense to know what’s going on, and that’s very useful for actually getting the message across, letting them know you’ve got to get tested within 72 hours, you’ve got to isolate and you’ve got to wait for a negative test,” Mr Donnellan said.