Only 26 of the latest 288 cases have been linked to known outbreaks, while the remaining 262 are under investigation, and Professor Sutton warned that worse might be to come.
"It is an indication of the transmission that was occurring a week ago that is showing up in the numbers today and we may well see it worsen before it gets better," Professor Sutton said.
"We know that there are continuing hotspots in the north-west corridor, in particular of recent days there has been an uptick, especially in Roxburgh Park and Craigieburn and Truganina.”
The Chief Health Officer said the community should prepare for more intensive care admissions and more loss of life.
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"We will see an increase in hospitalisations and ICU cases and in deaths in the coming days because of the spike that we have seen in recent days," he said. "It is not because the virus is worse, it is because we're seeing people who are most vulnerable, the elderly, those with chronic illness, coming down with infection."
Mr Andrews said government advice to residents of the lockdown zones - greater metropolitan Melbourne and the Mitchell Shire - was for adults over the age of 18 to wear a cloth mask when they were out of their homes and unable to maintain a social distance of at least 1.5 metres from others.
The Premier said 2 million reusable masks would be ordered for public distribution, with 1 million single-use masks available now. The advice to wear them was a recommendation and would not be enforced by police.
Victoria's previous highest daily total of COVID-19 cases was recorded on Tuesday, when 191 new cases emerged, before 134 were reported on Wednesday and 165 on Thursday.
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"It was always going to get worse before it got better," Mr Andrews said.
The Premier said the state carried out 37,588 tests on Thursday in what he said was the biggest single day of testing the state had seen "by some considerable margin".
Mr Andrews pleaded with the community in the locked-down zones to comply with the stay-at-home rules as the only way to restore a "sense of control" to the outbreak.
"If we all moderate our behaviour, if we stay at home and we follow the rules and get tested when we're sick, if we don't go out and about our business as usual if we are sick, then we will pull this up, we will bring a sense of control to this," the Premier said.
"That is what will deliver an effective strategy to suppress and control this and allow us to move to a COVID normal."
As the NSW government announced what it called a "troubling" case of a Victorian man who had driven across the state border and then tested positive in Sydney, Mr Morrison warned the whole nation against becoming complacent.
The Victorian Government are recommending that people wear masks in public to slow the spread of COVID-19. Credit:Paul Jeffers
"It is important to ensure social distancing is the norm, it is not the exception, it is the norm and it will be the norm for a very long time, until at least we have a vaccine that can be mass produced and made available across the population," the Prime Minister said.
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Mr Morrison said the Commonwealth and all the other states and territories would provide Victoria with whatever help was needed, particularly for its contact-tracing effort, which has been the subject of mounting criticism.
"In relation to testing and tracing support, the Victorian Government will have everything they need, not just from the Commonwealth but also from all states and territories," the Prime Minister said.
"They aren't short of anything they need from any part of any government in Australia."
Victoria's Chief Police Commissioner Shane Patton said on Friday that his officers would be clamping down hard on anybody flouting the stage three restrictions or trying to sneak out of the lockdown zones without a valid reason for travelling.
Chief Commissioner Patton said police had imposed 12 fines on motorists at road checkpoints, with 60 infringements issued elsewhere, including 16 fines at a birthday party in Dandenong after partygoers were spotted ordering large amounts of fried chicken from a local takeaway restaurant.
Fines were imposed on four sex workers in Melbourne's east on Thursday night after a report to CrimeStoppers that "a large amount of men were frequenting" a Glen Waverly address.
Despite Melbourne's second lockdown and the tough enforcement, coronavirus cases are spreading outside the city's boundary, with a childcare centre in Ocean Grove shut down and a Bendigo council staff member testing positive.
The Boorai Centre in Ocean Grove has been closed for deep cleaning after a child who went there on July 2 tested positive for the virus.
By Thursday, Geelong had a total of six active cases.
A council worker in Bendigo has also contracted the virus, taking the town's tally of active cases to four.
Noel Towell is State Political Editor for The Age
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2020-07-10 09:58:00Z
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