Hotel quarantine capacity around the country was halved last month over fears around new, more transmissible strains of COVID-19 that had been contracted by workers in the quarantine system.

NSW and Queensland would return to previous capacity levels on February 15, while South Australia would increase to take 530 people a week, and Victoria to 1310 a week.

Mr Morrison said the government was exploring ways to double the capacity of the Howard Springs facility in Darwin.

A proposal to build a facility for quarantine in Toowoomba would continue to be assessed, Mr Morrison said, after ruling out a similar proposal in Gladstone in Queensland.

"There is a lot more information we're going to need before we can get to an assessment of how we go forward on that," Mr Morrison said.

"It's not just about understanding what the costing arrangements, but it is understanding the workforce arrangements to run a facility like that and how that can be delivered in that location, what the impact is on other local health facilities in a regional location like that.

"There are fair questions from the health services up there. We worked through those with Howard Springs, I should say. But Howard Springs is close to Darwin, which is a different proposition to what Toowoomba is."

Mr Morrison said expanding the capacity at Howard Springs, where there was an existing facility and risks had so far been managed, may be a more effective solution than the new option in Toowoomba.

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Western Australia was yet to commit to increase its cap on arrivals as it continued to manage the risk posed by a hotel security worker contracting the virus late in January.

"The states are continuing to improve hotel quarantine around the country," Mr Morrison said, referring to the use of CCTV in facilities to track movements of staff in contact tracing and other developments.

"It has been incredibly effective. Over 211,000 people have gone through that process and the number of breaches we've had - albeit, when they do occur, they're serious - is incredibly small in comparison to that large volume."

While Australia continued its success in almost eradicating the virus, the major challenge for leaders was the thousands of Australians trying to get home through a hotel quarantine system with limited capacity.

That capacity was limited further after a cleaner working in hotel quarantine in Brisbane contracted the more transmissible UK strain of the virus, and questions around whether it was appropriate to hold quarantine in hotels in major cities continued since two more cases of workers contracting the virus in Perth and Melbourne.

Despite these breaches, Australia's chief medical officer Paul Kelly said the hotel quarantine system had been evolving, but would always need further improvements.

"It is already really top-class. We've seen only a small number of incursions from quarantine, and we need to understand these are complex systems with humans, and there is always an opportunity or a chance of human error," Mr Kelly said.

"There is also chance issues like two doors opening across a corridor, as has seemed to have occurred in the Victorian situation."

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