Eight of the newly announced cases were in quarantine for all of their infectious period, 19 were infectious in the community and five cases are under early investigation.

Twenty-four cases were linked to known cases, sixteen are household contacts. Ten people are in hospital. Two of them are in intensive care. One is requiring ventilation.

Chief Health Officer Kerryn Coleman said Saturday's high case numbers "can be indicative of a number of different things, and we actually still have a fair bit of work to get through today on these cases."

"While it is concerning, one high number on its own doesn't necessarily mean that we will continue this trend upwards or that our system is not working," Dr Coleman said.

She said ability to link cases and notify those infected was the most important element.

Chief Minister Andrew Barr said the ACT's contact tracers now had a busy weekend ahead of them.

There are over 250 active exposure locations, with more to come this afternoon associated with the new cases.

ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr said the numbers were "not what we wanted".

Mr Barr said it was too early to comment on what would happen with Canberra's lockdown beyond September 17.

He said the ACT government had not given up on COVID zero.

"It's not just the daily case numbers that are the important ones," he said, indicating authorities were looking at effective reproduction rate, total number of active cases, and the risk rate of those who were infectious in the community.

He said based on these factors "it is still possible this outbreak will be contained".

There have now been 359 cases in this outbreak. Of those, 120 people have recovered, leaving 239 active cases in the ACT.

Of the 359 cases, 314 are linked to known clusters and 37 are unlinked.

There are 14 public sites of transmission. Six of the new cases are linked to these sites.

There's one new linked case to the Lennock Jaguar Land Rover car dealership, bringing this cluster to 21 cases.

Five new cases are linked to Bidfood Canberra, this is one worker but four household contacts, bringing the total cluster to nine.

Two of these are NSW residents, not reflected in Canberra's numbers.

The ACT is set to receive almost 87,000 doses from the federal government's deal with the UK government for 4 million additional doses of Pfizer.

These will be arriving week by week, and will go primarily to GPs and pharmacists.

The Chief Minister said he anticipates the first batch will arrive in Canberra at the end of next week.

It is due to leave the UK this weekend and the TGA will then undertake batch testing, he said.

These doses, alongside the 500,000 from Singapore, and one million from Poland, will rebalance per capita distributions, after NSW received more than its population share last month.

Mr Barr said a decision on moving second doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine forward "is one that is under consideration."

"It's obviously an issue that requires firm medical advice coming out of ATAGI."

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Chief health officer Dr Kerryn Coleman spoke about balancing restrictions and public health, after some restrictions were slightly relaxed from Thursday 5pm.

"I acknowledge we may not always get this right ... we will constantly review the level of risk to our community and will adjust these settings accordingly," she said.

She reminded the community that they should be cautious with who they spend time outdoors with.

Mr Barr said the government was seeking to balance many competing interests in containing this outbreak.

"It is really difficult now, but if this virus gets out massively in our community, life would be a lot worse than it is at the moment," he said.

"It's going to be a really tough Spring, we understand that and we are doing our very best to make life easier whilst we are in this lockdown phase."

The AIS mass vaccination hub was opened on Friday, and administered 1451 doses, it has capacity for 24,000 doses per day.

Mr Barr on Friday urged Canberrans to come forward for testing, with a number of cases in the community for part of their infectious period.

Dr Coleman said this week that about 3000-3500 tests per day would be ideal.

Rain has affected testing sites in Canberra on Saturday. The Brindabella drive-through closed due to the weather, and there is a warning the Kambah clinic could be forced to close, too.

No new close-contact exposure sites were listed on Saturday, but a number of supermarkets were added to the casual exposure list, and Fyshwick Fresh Food Markets was added with advice to monitor for times on Sunday.

The ACT's numbers come as Victoria recorded 190 locally acquired cases, while NSW has recorded 1533 cases.

It was another day of record COVID-19 cases in NSW, with 1533 new locally acquired cases in the 24 hours to 8pm Friday and four deaths.

COVID fragments have been detected in the sewage at Cooma.

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