The Premier Daniel Andrews has announced that playgrounds reopening, in-home childcare rules and prioritising Year 12 student vaccinations are among what he described as the 'modest changes' that will take place in Victoria from midnight on Thursday.

Regional schools will have to wait until the regional announcement on easing next week to see if they can salvage something of term three.

The news was slightly better for regional Victoria with the exception of Shepparton, which will be kept isolated, but the details on what rules would change were scant.

"We think we will be able to end the lockdown in the rest of regional Victoria next week," he said.

"Exactly when, we will confirm as soon as we can. The nature of that ending of the lockdown, so there will be an opening up, there will be significant, substantial restrictions on what can occur and of course no-one other than those who are authorised will be able to go to regional Victoria from metropolitan Melbourne."

Mr Andrews also announced a blitz of vaccinations for Year 12 students in effort to get them back to school by Term 4.

For Melbourne schools, the news about getting back into the classroom were not so good.

"Next week I will outline a detailed plan for what term four will look like," he said.

"The key point here we will vaccinate our year 12 is in good time and in coming days we will have more to say about how we're going to do the balance of year 11, year 10, all the way down to a 12-year-old

The five rules for leaving home will still apply for all Victorians and mask wearing regulations remain unchanged.

In the few other changes the premier flagged, he set September 23 as the first possible date when the 5km radius could be expanded for Melbourne and when the time for exercise is expanded to three hours.

From this date outdoor gym equipment, outdoor training and house inspections will also be permitted but the Premier would not enlarge on other changes and stressed the date depended on the vaccination rates.

But Mr Andrews also flagged that many restrictions would remain for the medium-term period in order to contain the Delta variant outbreak.

"If there are other things we can add to that list for the 23 September, we will," Mr Andrews said.

"But it's not like two weeks after that there's a whole lot of other things can be added on and another two weeks there will be more things to be eased. These will be the settings we will all have to live with for a period of time until we reach not just first dose vaccination thresholds, but second dose vaccination thresholds as outlined in the national cabinet plan, the 70% to dose and 80% to dose."

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The premier defended the paucity of the changes based on the most recent health advice given late on Tuesday night and the risk of the latest outbreak getting out of control.

Mr Andrews said the deteriorating numbers over the last three days had forced him to make tougher decisions than he had initially hoped.

"It was a bad night,' he said. "None of us have the luxury of ignoring that [advice], none of us have the luxury of shopping for the advice that we want.

"When we get advice, we follow it and the data and the evidence and the experts are very clear with us. We will not see these case numbers go down. They are going to go up."

Earlier today Victoria recorded 120 new coronavirus cases, with 64 infections linked to known COVID-19 outbreaks.

There are now 900 active cases of COVID-19 in the state.

The last time Victoria's cases numbers exceeded 100 was on September 2 last year, when 110 cases were recorded.

Sixty-four cases have been linked to existing virus outbreaks, leaving 56 potential mystery cases, with 56,501 people tested for COVID-19.

Victoria has also recorded its first deaths in the current outbreak, after the health department revealed two women aged in their 40s and 60s died at home on Tuesday.

READ MORE: 'Modest changes'; Premier will wait on threshold numbers before announcing easing

They are the first COVID-related deaths recorded in Victoria since November 30 last year, and will take the state's overall toll to 822 when officially tallied on Wednesday.

- with AAP

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