Queensland’s border could open earlier than planned if Australia’s COVID-19 status improves, the state’s chief health officer says.

Asked on Sunday if the state government still plans to open the border on July 10, marking stage three of the road map to easing restrictions, Dr Jeannette Young said their method to making any changes stayed the same.

“At the end of this month we will review all of our epidemiology,” she told reporters.

“Not only ours here in Queensland but from across the country to make those decisions about our borders.”

Dr Young said the stage three date would remain as July 10 “unless of course something … was very different either way”.

“If things were a lot better then of course we could bring that date forward, as did happen for this month’s stage two,” she said.

“Or if something were to happen interstate, I’m sure everyone would expect that we then push that date out.

“That’s always been the role of that road map, at the end of each month we’ve reviewed the situation we’re in.”

The reopening date was announced after Prime Minister Scott Morrison put the hard word on state and territory leaders at National Cabinet in Canberra on Friday.

“I would like to make one thing very clear to the states and territories today,” he said.

“If you cannot come to your state from Sydney then no one is coming to your state from Singapore. So if you want borders open for international students then you need to open borders for Australians.”

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the state wasn’t dissenting from the advice.

“We are at one on this in terms of July,” she said.

There were 18 new cases of COVID-19 reported in Australia in the 24 hours to Sunday night but none in the Sunshine State.

Nine were in New South Wales, being eight returned travellers and a primary school teacher, and the other nine were in Victoria.

Five of those cases were linked to outbreaks, three were detected in hotel quarantine and one through routine testing.

Dr Young noted “there is some ongoing level of community transmission in southern states at the moment”.

But she has relaxed her stance on wanting to see a month go by without such a case recorded before lifting the state’s border restrictions, noting it does not have the “same degree of significance” as in previous months.

“Of course that’s the ideal, that’s one factor that we place a lot of significance on but there are other factors as well,” she said.

“We’ve got to remember, we’re in a totally different position here today in Queensland than we were back in March.”

She said the state would not have been able to manage an increase in cases and contact tracing, potentially from interstate travellers, when 80 new cases were being recorded there each day and up to 100 people needed to be contacted per person.

“Now we have a lot more contact tracers here in Queensland plus we have 500 additional people who have been trained if we need them,” Dr Young said.

“We definitely don’t need them at the moment of course, only having one case every day or so.”

Queensland Health Minister and Deputy Premier Steven Miles was asked whether the government was considering opening the border to certain states, such as NSW, first.

“Some work has been done on how, logistically, that could be done,” he said.

“Our preference though would be to lift the borders all at once, hopefully on the 10th of July, depending on that assessment at the end of the month,” he said.

Dr Miles said a travel bubble between states “would be possible” but is “probably unlikely”.

“It’s difficult to see how we could enforce something like that but certainly throughout this whole situation, we’ve assessed all of the possible options and that has been one that’s been considered at different points in time,” he said.

“There’s legal difficulty, there’s also the practical difficulty of how you implement that both at the physical border and at airports.”

He said Queensland had contained the virus better than the state government anticipated when the stages to ease restrictions were first decided.

“We brought stage two forward very substantially and so we’ll continue to consider, based on the facts and the evidence, what we can do as quickly as we can do so safely,” he said.