Weddings will be limited to no more than five people and funerals will be restricted to no more than 10 people.

Australians will be banned from travelling overseas, unless they met a set of exemptions, and those returning from travel have been urged to comply with restrictions regarding self-isolation.

There will be more announcements to come, with another national cabinet meeting scheduled for tomorrow night. Issues to be discussed include leases.

It comes as the number of coronavirus cases in Australia exceeds 2000.

Mr Morrison announced food courts would be closed from midnight tomorrow, except for takeaway orders.

The shopping centres themselves would remain open, and Mr Morrison said there was no need for people to rush out to shopping centres.

"Go and get things as you need them," he said.

Auction houses and gatherings in auction rooms could "no longer continue" after midnight tomorrow.

Open house inspections and real estate auctions would also cease.

Mr Morrison said people should look to the direction of their states and territories on outdoor and indoor markets. Food markets would continue.

Personal services including beauty therapy, tanning, waxing, nail salons, tattoo parlours, spas massage parlours would close, except for those operating on health-related grounds.

Mr Morrison said hairdressers and barber shops would continue to be able to provide services, but would have to strictly manage social distancing and limitations around the number of people in their premises at any given time. Appointments would also have to be restricted to no more than 30 minutes.

Amusement parks, arcades, and indoor and outdoor play centres would have to close.

Boot camps and personal training would be limited to 10 people, with social distancing to be strictly enforced.

Mr Morrison said the "point and principle" behind the decisions ought to be clear: governments were seeking to avoid the possibility of large gatherings of people.

Mr Morrison said weddings could continue to be conducted where just the couple, the celebrant and witnesses were present, limiting the attendees to no more than five people.

"Large gatherings won't be possible under the new arrangements," he said.

"Sadly, also - and I know this will be very difficult - funerals [will be restricted to] no more than 10 persons.

"This is not an easy decision."

He said governments had already found some of the events which saw some of the largest transmissions of coronavirus had been "exactly these types of events, particularly weddings".

Mr Morrison used his address to urge Australians to stay at home unless it was absolutely necessary to go out.

He said leaving home for "the basics", like exercising with a small number of people one was living with, was acceptable. As was going to the supermarket or going to work, if a person could not work from home.

Otherwise, Mr Morrison made a point of saying people should only be leaving their homes to do essential things.

He instructed people not to congregate together in groups, including outdoors.

Mr Morrison said house visits should be kept to a minimum and only with a "very small" number of guests.

"We don't want to be overly specific about that, we want Australians to exercise their common sense," Mr Morrison said.

Large gatherings, like birthday parties and community barbecues would not be possible, nor would large family gatherings.

"All of these things present risks," Mr Morrison said.

States and territories would be looking at whether specific measures would be put in place regarding house parties - namely, any repercussions for hosting them.

Mr Morrison stuck by his decisions on Sunday, saying the advice of medical experts had not changed.

"It is safe to send your children to school," the prime minister said.

He is scheduled to meet with educational leaders tomorrow to discuss a set of arrangements the federal government "would like to proceed with that importantly keep schools open, that will also protect those teachers and other staff who are working in schools."

"It's going to be a tough year... and one of the things I don't want to have yielded up is a year of a child's education, which is so important," Mr Morrison said.

He said the number of the students attending schools had reduced significantly.

But Mr Morrison said it was important schools remained open, partly to educate children of essential workers.

"Who is an essential worker? Someone who has a job. Every single job that is being done in our economy with these severe restrictions taking place is essential," Mr Morrison said.

He said schools could provide distance learning for families that wished for students to remain at home.

Australia's Chief Medical Officer, Professor Brendan Murphy said well supervised and well structured classrooms were probably safer than children roaming in the community.

"There is no evidence... of major transmission among school children," he said.

Whether that might occur was not known.

Professor Murphy said there needed to be measures to protect vulnerable teachers, which were to be discussed.

Australia's 'do not travel' warning for all overseas travel will be ramped up into a ban.

"No-one should be getting on a plane and going overseas," Mr Morrison said.

There would be some exceptions, which Mr Morrison said would be stated in a directive to be released tomorrow.

But he was concerned a small number of people were still defying government advice and seeking to go overseas on leisure travel, based on the number of people still departing Australia.

"They can't do it," Mr Morrison said.

He said travellers were putting people at risk of exposure when they returned.

"The number of Australians going overseas had reduced dramatically," Mr Morrison said.

He said arrangements were being made to seize at the border those who were profiteering and seeking to export Australian goods illegally.

Mr Morrison said "quantities of materials seeking to be sent overseas" had already been seized at Australia's borders.

Seized assets would be redeployed to their best use in Australia.

Mr Morrison said the government was deeply sorry about difficulties accessing assistance from Centrelink and that no resource was being spared to address the issues.

He said he was finding the barriers people were facing deeply distressing and the government was doing its very best, including extending operating hours.

Mr Morrison said no system was built to deal with the circumstances and events Australia had recently faced, as a nation.

Assistance would be dated back to when people expressed the intent to apply for help.

Mr Morrison said there were still sectors that needed workers, like social services, supermarkets, manufacturing and those responsible for logistics.

"We need people to go and work in those jobs and we are going to encourage people to do just that," he said.

The Chief Medical Officer said the growth of coronavirus cases in Australia was "very steep" and "very concerning", particularly in the past few days.

A significant proportion of new cases were still returned travellers or contacts of returned travellers, Professor Murphy said.

He expressed concern that returned travellers or contacts of returned travellers were not going directly home to isolate for the required 14 days.

"I want to emphasise again, we are really serious now about a returned traveller," Professor Murphy said.

He said they ought to leave the point of disembarkation and go directly home for 14 days.

"Don't go anywhere on the way from the cruise ship or the airport or wherever you're coming from," Professor Murphy said.

States and territories would be checking on returned travellers.

Professor Murphy stressed that people who identified as a contact "must self isolate".

"You must not go to the chemist when you've been told you've got the disease," he said.

He said some people had been told they had tested positive to COVID-19 or been exposed to someone who had had gone to the supermarket or chemist.

Professor Murphy said the other important part of the controls was social distancing.

He said there were instances of community transmission in small pockets of the country.

"We have to get people to take this seriously. We have to change the way we interact as human beings in our society for quite a long time," Professor Murphy said.

"This virus will be with us for some time. We have to think about avoiding any unnecessary interactions where you are close to someone and will put them at risk."

Mr Morrison said Australia had one of the highest COVID-19 testing rates in the world, having completed 147,000 tests.

He said Australia had been able to secure a supply of hundreds of thousands more tests.

"Testing is critical to how we measure the coronavirus and its impact," Mr Morrison said.

He said many tools had to be used to fight the virus. Australians listening was critical to the process.

"We know this is a massive change to our lives, but if we do it and we do it consistently... we will get through this."

Are the restrictions too 'draconian', or don't they go far enough?

Both the prime minister and the chief medical officer responded to both ways of seeing it, throughout the media conference.

Professor Murphy described the measures already announced as "draconian" but said the aim was to prepare for the long haul, to achieve a balance of keeping people safe and society functioning.

He was critical of the idea that measures could be put in place for a short period of time, like four weeks, then stopped.

Professor Murphy said the desired approach was to put as restrictive measures in place as possible, without destroying life as people knew it.

"If Australians all do the right things, that will achieve the outcomes that we want," he said.

He said it was possible the measures would have to be scaled up if the number of COVID-19 cases in Australia did not drop in response to the existing restrictions.

Responding to questions about the need for even more restrictive approaches at this point, Mr Morrison said: 'What we will do is put these measures in place and should the information and the advice change we should contemplate it at the time."

He said it was important people were able to do something like go to the shop - not only for them, but for the economy.

"This country is not dealing with one crisis. We're dealing with two crises," Mr Morrison said.

"We're dealing with a health crisis that has caused an economic crisis."

Mr Morrison said he was as concerned about the outcomes of the economic crisis as he was about the health outcomes of managing the outbreak of the coronavirus.

"Lives are at risk in both cases," the prime minister said.

Asked why more people would be allowed to partake in a boot camp than a wedding, he said training was a business.

"That is someone's livelihood. I'm not going to be cavalier about people's jobs and their businesses," Mr Morrison said.

Where possible, he said the national cabinet was going to keep Australia functioning in a way that was not going to compromise the health advice it was receiving.

Mr Morrison said the national cabinet would not rush decisions on "an opinion of inevitability".

"We will calmly consider the medical advice put to us," he said.

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