The community would need to have its sense of COVID risks changed and be convinced new restrictions actually made a difference to the rate of infection if governments again wanted to impose stricter rules, experts say.
State and territory governments have encouraged people to wear face masks but none have reintroduced legal requirements, despite growing case numbers in a new wave driven by the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants.
The expert medical group which advises the federal government on vaccinations will meet on Wednesday, where it is expected to consider recommending a fourth COVID-19 vaccination dose for the wider population.
Fourth doses are currently only available to those aged 65 and over, or people with conditions which make them susceptible to the virus.
About 77 per cent of ACT residents aged 16 and over have had three doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, significantly lower than the 97.4 per cent of the territory's population aged five and over has had two doses.
The ACT reported the death of a woman in her 70s with COVID-19 on Tuesday, the 81st person to die with the virus in the territory since the start of the pandemic.
Hospitals in Canberra were caring for 136 patients with coronavirus on Monday night, including two people in intensive care.
The number of patients in hospital with the virus has remained consistently high in recent days, and has fallen slightly from the record of 138 COVID-positive patients on July 1.
Health authorities reported 1199 new cases of COVID-19 in the 24 hours to 8pm on Tuesday, and are aware of 7245 active cases in the community. Authorities have previously said they expect to miss 40 per cent of new virus cases in official tallies.
Professor Kate Reynolds, an expert at the Australian National University's research school of psychology, said the community needed to be convinced health restrictions were legitimate, worked to curb COVID-19 and that other people around them were following the rules.
"They have to believe that if they do the behaviour that it's actually going to make a difference," Professor Reynolds said.
Professor Reynolds said it would be harder for health authorities to make the case for restrictions, such as mask wearing, because the rules needed to be broadly consistent and the community's sense of COVID risks had changed through widespread exposure and vaccination.
"I think if it's possible to navigate these elements of what we know drives behaviour, people will of course be able to do the behaviour. It has to be evidence based, it has to be consistent, it has to be enforceable and they have to be very serious about doing it," she said.
Dr Diana Cardenas, a research fellow in psychology at the ANU, said the community's perception of COVID-19 risks was skewed and authorities would need to shift this to effectively impose restrictions to curb the virus' spread.
"What we think is risky is not necessarily what is actually risky. One of the best examples is that we feel safer around friends and family and people that we know even though we're much more likely to get COVID from people that are close to us than random strangers from the supermarket," Dr Cardenas said.
Dr Cardenas said the government had been telling citizens to live with COVID but had not created a clear set of instructions to do so.
"That tells the public that learning to live with COVID you do whatever you want, so now having to introduce a new way of learning to live with COVID is introducing a new set of norms and a new set of behaviours that might have been easier done from the beginning," she said.
"Now the challenge is to teach us again and tell us again what it means to live with COVID."
ACT Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith on Monday expressed caution about the effectiveness of reintroducing mandates, but said she would not rule any changes to restrictions in or out as the government would follow advice from health officials.
"There is a view that mandatory mask requirements might not be as effective as they have been in the past, partly because those people who are willing to wear masks are already doing so," Ms Stephen-Smith said.
But the ACT's Mental Health Minister, Emma Davidson, indicated some support for doing more to limit the spread of COVID-19 in the community.
"If we are to protect older Canberrans and people with other health conditions who are most at risk, we need to have some serious conversations as a community about how to reduce COVID transmission," Ms Davidson wrote on Twitter.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the state was not introducing a mask mandate but discussions were taking place about urging people in certain settings to wear masks.
NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard and the state's chief health officer, Dr Kerry Chant, on Tuesday used a press conference to encourage people to wear masks in situations where they could not socially distance and to ensure they took up all vaccine doses that were available to them.
Health authorities in NSW expect a new wave of COVID infections driven by the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants would peak in late July or early August.
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