Passengers on the initial flight arrived at Christmas Island on Tuesday morning and will be quarantined for two weeks. Australia is working with New Zealand to share seats on an evacuation flight chartered by Air New Zealand expected to leave Wuhan late Tuesday. Health Minister Greg Hunt said he expected more than 50 Australians to be on that flight.

The Politburo meeting warned of severe consequences for local officials who did not do everything in their power to contain the outbreak. Local officials in Wuhan have been blamed for allowing the virus to spread around the country because they failed to declare an emergency earlier.

With China the world's growth engine, the ramifications of a pandemic for the global economy could be huge. Getty

"Anyone who fails to perform their duties will be punished," Mr Xi was quoted by state media as saying.

A court in the the remote northern province of Heilongjiang said it would apply the death penalty for people intentionally spreading the virus. Other cities have also flagged detention or other severe penalties.

After weeks of allowing some of China's independent media outlets to report on the outbreak uncensored, there are now signs the Communist Party is tightening its grip on how the crisis is being reported.

An article by the respected Caijing magazine interviewing the families of suspected coronavirus victims who were cremated before they could be properly diagnosed was suddenly deleted earlier this week.

The article suggested there are huge numbers of victims who are not recorded in the official statistics because they are not hospitalised. Doctors and hospital officials back up suggestions that as few as five out of 120 fever patients a day at an outpatient clinic might be admitted to hospital.


"Efforts should be made to seriously investigate and deal with false accusations and frame-ups," the Politburo meeting said, suggesting this would also involve a crackdown on critical media reporting.

Mr Xi's comments are likely to lead to an even more draconian response to the outbreak by nervous local government officials who will want to be seen to be doing everything they can to tackle the crisis. Residents in Xinyu, a city in the south-east Chinese province of Jiangxi, told The Australian Financial Review authorities were only allowing one family member out of their apartment every two days to buy supplies.

One woman, who works as a nurse, said her compound was locked down by riot police after one of the residents was diagnosed with coronavirus. Residents were not allowed to leave their apartments at all and supplies had to be delivered.

In Beijing and Shanghai there are strict checks on citizens returning to their residential compounds or apartment blocks and temperature checks when entering shopping malls and the few restaurants remaining open. The government has ordered non-essential businesses to stay closed until February 10.

Beijing also criticised the United States and "other developed" nations for closing their borders to mainland China. Australia followed the US on Sunday in banning any foreign national who has visited China in the last 14 days. This included thousands of Chinese students at Australian universities.

"Regrettably, it was precisely the US and some other developed countries with sound health systems and advanced public health capabilities that imposed unnecessary or even excessive restrictions on China, which clearly runs counter to WHO advice," a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said.

Hubei Province reported 2345 new cases of the virus with 64 new deaths and 101 recovered on February 3. The total number of infected in the province rose to 13,522, with 396 recovered and 414 dead.

While China's national death toll has been steadily rising, doctors said they were heartened by an increase in the number of recovering victims, which now exceeded the death toll. The coronavius, which produces pneumonia-like symptoms, is far less deadly than SARS.