Stephen Byron said the capital had shown home quarantine had not led to wider community transmission.

There have been zero cases of a person quarantined at home instead of a hotel infecting others, then spreading out into the community, despite more than 2000 diplomats and Australian government officials being allowed to skip the official process.

"The ACT has been doing it and it's worked exceptionally well. There hasn't been a leakage," Mr Byron said.

"In my mind, it's safe. Home quarantine can work. In future, as we open our borders to low-risk countries, there are options around home quarantine."

The ACT government should "have an open and positive mind", he said.

The ACT government was not so keen, though. It indicated it would follow federal policy.

"We will continue to work with the Commonwealth on what alternative quarantine models could be implemented in the ACT, in line with any national cabinet decisions," a statement from ACT Health said.

ACT chief health officer Kerryn Coleman said home quarantine was the "way forward" but transforming the program from diplomats and officials to the general public was challenging.

"There's a different degree of support and in-reach kind of supports that have to happen for home quarantine, as opposed to hotel quarantine," she said.

"Doing that from a bespoke up to a scale model can be quite challenging. There are lots of things to look at to do that."

Dr Coleman said the logistics of a broader home quarantine would need to be worked through.

"In a hotel we can just send a group of nurses into a hotel, but how do we get the entry and exit testing that we do currently," she said.

"How do we check on people and make sure they're safely where they need to be? That's easy [at a hotel]; you just put a security guard at the front door."

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Home quarantine has been a controversial topic in recent weeks.

The federal government and the governments of states and territories have preferred keeping incomers in hotels or at two "mandatory supervised quarantine facilities" in the Northern Territory - one at Howard Springs near Darwin and the other at Alice Springs.

Despite the leakages, governments felt that hotels were easier to monitor, and potentially infected people could be kept further from daily life in communities.

Some of the outbreaks in Sydney and Melbourne have come from quarantine in hotels, particularly when staff have taken infections out into the wider community.

Labor foreign affairs spokesperson Penny Wong has criticised the policy, saying hotels were turning into "coronavirus distribution centres".

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