Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy has called on people to police friends and acquaintances failing to obey quarantine rules and "come down hard on them".
"Every single Australian who lands on our shore, whether it's from a cruise ship or a plane, or any other means of transportation needs to rigorously quarantine for 14 days now," Professor Murphy said.
"You are placing your fellow citizens at risk if you don't.
"So, if you know of anyone who has come back from overseas and is not quarantining, please come down very hard on them.
"We are now in a different world. This world could last for some time. This is the world of social distancing. This is a new way of us interacting with each other all of the time."
Five of the new cases announced in Canberra today were linked to the Ruby Princess cruise ship.
Health Minister Greg Hunt revealed at Question Time that masks ordered by Australia had been "diverted at the last minute" by other countries or individuals at some borders. He did not provide detail, but said, "It is a difficult world out there and we're doing everything we can to make sure that those masks that we have ordered are arriving".
Some had arrived overnight last night, and another 300 million were on order, he said.
Australia also had 1.5 million test kits on order, including fingerprint tests, he said.
Australia had done 135,000 virus tests, with a positive rate of fewer than 1 per cent, one of the lowest in the world. The positive rate in the United States was 13 per cent and in South Korea about 3 per cent, he said.
Question Time was also told that authorities were working to get gloves, gowns , masks and ventilators made in Australia. Hand sanitisers would soon be back on shelves, with 90,000 bottles a day being manufactured by an Australian firm, five times their normal output.
Australia had done 135,000 virus tests, with a positive rate of less than 1 per cent, one of the lowest positive rates in the world. The positive rate in the United States was 13 per cent, in Britain at 5 per cent and in South Korea about 3 per cent, he said.
"It means that we are testing broadly and more widely than almost everybody else and therefore picking up cases," he said.
Australia has 1709 confirmed cases by Monday, a jump of more than 600 in one day and more than 1400 in just one week. Fewer than 20 cases had been to intensive care, and only seven people had died, both numbers much lower than the rest of the world, Mr Hunt said.
Professor Murphy said Victoria had announced a 500-strong police unit to enforce social distancing, Queensland had put legal quarantine orders on people, and other states and territories would significantly ramp up compliance.
He also revealed that all states and territories had now cancelled category 3 surgery and were doing only category 1, which included cancers and urgent heart surgery, and urgent category 2 surgery, he said.
The move was to save supplies of personal protective equipment. Australia was also setting up local manufacturing of masks and was confident the equipment situation would get better, he said.
Authorities were also moving to save limited testing kit supplies by not "wasting" a test to check whether the virus could still be detected in someone who had recovered.
"We probably will no longer be doing viral clearances. If people are well for a few weeks, we can assume that they are cleared," he said.
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With borders closed, Professor Murphy said the challenge was now to control community transmission.
"We have to make sure that everybody who gets the virus - most of them will be pretty well and not be too sick - but they must be quarantined. They must identify their contacts. We must quarantine them too. We must isolate everybody who is unwell," he said. "We must make sure that we protect the vulnerable people in our community, particularly the elderly."
Schools were "a very vexed and controversial issue", he said.
He reiterated previous statements that very few children contracted COVID-19 and it was very uncommon for children to show symptoms. Now was there evidence of major transmission among schools in children.
There were downsides of children not going to school, including having children miss school for months on end.
But he said the "risks benefit calculations" were assessed each day and while the national medical group had concluded on Sunday that the risks of children not going to school were greater than the risks of them staying at school, that might change, he said.
In Canberra, schools are in confusion, with parents at government schools told by email that schools are closed to children from Tuesday but Chief MInister Andrew Barr saying children of essential workers can still go.
- For information on COVID-19, please go to the ACT Health website or federal Health Department's website.
- You can also call the Coronavirus Health Information Line on 1800 020 080
- If you have serious symptoms, such as difficulty breathing, call Triple Zero (000)
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