Australians are being urged to reconsider travel to Melbourne, to avoid coronavirus seeding into other parts of the country during the school holidays.
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The warning comes as COVID-19 cases more than doubled in a week, setting the country back to the early days of the pandemic in Australia.
There were 140 cases in the seven days to Sunday, almost all of them in Victoria. Victoria saw 116 new cases in the week, NSW 21, Western Australia two and Queensland one.
The previous week saw just 62 new cases, 35 of them in Victoria.
Australia's news cases were in the single digits in early March, before jumping to double digits in the second week and taking off from there. There were 50 cases in the first week of March and 230 in the second week.
The outbreaks have caused governments in Queensland and Western Australia to rethink plans to reopen their borders and Tasmania says its borders will remain closed
But Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the Victorian outbreaks in terms of "living with COVID-19" and said the economy would continue to open up.
"We always said we were not going for eradication of the virus. We have to ensure that we can run our economy, run our lives, run our communities alongside this virus. Until there's a vaccine, then that's what we have to contend with. We can't just shut everything up forever - the economic impacts of that are devastating," Mr Morrison said.
"There will be set backs from time to time, but we have systems to deal with the set backs."
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the border would remain open between NSW and Victoria, but she went further than the national advice, which is recommending no travel to the hotspot areas in Melbourne.
Ms Berejiklian advised staying away from Melbourne altogether.
"We would recommend people not at this stage travel to Melbourne unless they have to," she said.
"You should not be travelling to those hot spots at all unless absolutely essential. We would recommend nobody travelling to those hot spots."
But ACT Chief Health Officer Kerryn Coleman has not issued any blanket warnings about travelling to Melbourne.
She has strongly discouraged travel to and from the Victorian hotspots, saying there will be increased communication about it in the lead-up to ACT school holidays.
"We haven't enforced any travel restrictions to date so it's not likely unless things considerably change for the worse that we would do so now," Dr Coleman said.
Australia recorded 125 new cases in the week to Sunday.
Another case has been diagnosed in a protester who attended the Black Lives Matter rally in Melbourne on June 6, but Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos said the person was linked to an outbreak at retailer H and M and was not believed to have contracted the virus at the protest. The person had been wearing a mask at the protest.
The case is the fourth linked to the Northland H and M shop, three of them are staff members and the fourth a family member.
Two more cases have been linked to the Stamford Plaza quarantine hotel outbreak, bringing the total there to 14. The hotel outbreak and cases in other quarantine hotels has implications for Canberra, where 350 international students will soon arrive to two weeks of hotel quarantine.
Two more primary teachers had been diagnosed. One had worked while infectious from June 15 to 17. Another case had emerged in a childcare centre.
Victoria has mobilised testing units and roving testing squads into hotspot areas, and is offering testing to anyone at the Keilor Downs secondary school and Albanvale Primary school. Authorities there said they were concerned about the strong pocket of disadvantage in some of the areas identified, where people might be reluctant to stay home from work, and areas where English was a second language.
Sixteen news cases have been diagnosed in Victoria in the past 24 hours.
Victoria's chief health officer Professor Brett Sutton said the Black Lives Matter protest had not contributed to the outbreak.
The Melbourne hotspots are the local government areas of Hume, Casey, Brimbank, Moreland, Cardinia and Darebin - areas to the north and the southeast of the city centre.
A lockdown was not being imposed.
"It is not a lockdown, there are not legal directions that apply to these areas and it is a very broad descriptor," Professor Sutton said.
"But it is sensible from a national perspective to say if these areas can be avoided, if people can understand that other parts of the country are less of a risk, then these particular areas, then just make a consideration about your travel plans for these areas."
Ms Mikakos said nine people were hospitalised in Victoria, two in intensive care, a concerning jump on the four people a few days ago.
"We haven't issued stay at home directives, but of course we don't rule anything out," she said.
ABC health commentator Norman Swan also suggested on Monday that an outbreak was also associated with a GP, but that remains unconfirmed.