The government will extend coronavirus testing to aged care residents and possibly also to doctors with symptoms, but remains adamant that people in the wider community will not be tested unless they have returned from an impacted country or have contact with a case.
Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy said there was no point in testing Australians simply because they had respiratory or cold and flu symptoms.
Other than a "small and controlled" cluster of community transmission in Sydney, cases were largely confined to returned travellers.
"If you're a returned traveller or you've been in contact with someone who has been a confirmed case, then you should be tested. But other Australians do not need testing and all they're doing is putting an unnecessary burden on the testing," he said.
He said the national medical committee was considering whether to extend testing to doctors with fevers. And authorities were working on pathology companies being able to go into aged care homes to test residents with symptoms to avoid older people having to attend GP clinics or hospitals.
"The number of Australians who should be tested at the moment is well within the capacity of current testing but we are expanding and getting ready and I'm just trying to tell people to stay reasonably calm about this," he said.
"We're not testing asymptomatic people because there is no value. If you think you've been in contact with someone and you have a negative test, it doesn't mean at all that you're not incubating the virus. You may not show the virus until you're symptomatic. That's why we're not favouring doing tests on asymptomatic people. We want to test the people for whom it's appropriate to test and to get quick results."
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Asked for details on testing capacity, he said the private laboratories were now being funded for testing and were scaling up rapidly.
"They will do as many tests as we require," he said. "They have huge capacity ... and they can scale up enormously as needed so we haven't set a number on that. They'll do as many as needed."
The government was aiming for same-day turnaround on tests.
The Commonwealth is spending $200 million to fund 100 respiratory clinics around the country. It is unclear how many Canberra will get, but Health Minister Greg Hunt said they could include GP practices which had chosen to become dedicated coronavirus clinics or options such as drive-through clinics.
In Canberra 306 people have been tested so far, all negative. In NSW, more than 10,000 people have been tested, with 61 cases by 8pm on Tuesday. Australia has about 120 cases.
In Sydney, doctors say the number of people seeking testing has overwhelmed some clinics.
Australia's Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy sought to calm concern, saying Australia's numbers were still small, and while more were expected, it was a very mild illness for most.
"I'm just trying to tell people to stay reasonably calm about this," he said.
"Certainly we are worried about the elderly. Certainly we are worried if we have a large outbreak that that would put pressure on our hospitals .... but at the moment, there is no reason for community panic in Australia."
Dr Murphy said Australia was yet to enter an epidemic, but if it did, the phase could be as short as six to eight weeks, or as long as 14 to 16 weeks
He was speaking as Australia imposed a travel ban on Italy, which took effect at 6pm on Wednesday night, with the country in lock down and hospitals there struggling to cope.
Italy had just 155 cases two and a half weeks ago, on February 23, comparable with Australia's case numbers now. But since then numbers have skyrocketed to more than 10,000 with 631 deaths, and Italian doctors have been writing about the overwhelming conditions where some hospitals are turning their entire operations over to trying to save patients with insufficient equipment and patients with other illnesses going untreated.
Australian residents, citizens and immediate family are allowed in from Italy if they self-isolate for 14 days, but no-one else who has been in Italy in the past 14 days is allowed to enter Australia. Italy joins Iraq, South Korea and China on the travel blacklist.
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