The death toll from China’s coronavirus outbreak jumped to 41 from 26 a day earlier as the Lunar New Year got off to a gloomy start, with many transport links and tourist sites shut, while Australia confirmed its first four cases.

More than 1,300 people have been infected globally with a virus traced to a seafood market in the central city of Wuhan that was illegally selling wildlife. Health authorities around the world are scrambling to prevent a pandemic.

State-run China Global Television Network reported in a tweet that a doctor who had been treating patients in Wuhan, 62-year-old Liang Wudong, had died from the virus.

The number of confirmed cases in China stands at 1,287, the National Health Commission said. The virus has also been detected in Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Nepal, Malaysia, France, the United States and Australia.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it had 63 patients under investigation, with two confirmed cases, both in people who had travelled to Wuhan.

Hubei province, where authorities are rushing to build a 1,000 bed hospital in six days to treat patients, announced that there were 658 patients affected by the virus in treatment, 57 of whom were critically ill.

The newly-identified coronavirus has created alarm because there are still many  unknowns surrounding it, such as how dangerous it is and how easily it spreads between people. It can cause pneumonia, which has been deadly in some cases. Symptoms include fever, difficulty breathing and coughing. Most of the fatalities have been in elderly patients, many with pre-existing conditions, the WHO said.

Vehicles carrying emergency supplies and medical staff for Wuhan would be exempted from tolls and given traffic priority, China’s transportation ministry said.

Wuhan said it would ban non-essential vehicles from its downtown starting January 26 to control the spread of the virus, further paralysing a city of 11 million that has been on virtual lockdown since January 23, with nearly all flights cancelled and checkpoints blocking the main roads leading out of town. Authorities have since imposed transport restrictions on nearly all of Hubei province, which has a population of 59 million.

In Australia, three men, aged 53, 43 and 35 in New South Wales were in stable condition after they were confirmed to have the virus after returning from Wuhan earlier this month, the state’s health minister, Brad Hazzard said.

In Beijing, workers in white protective suits checked temperatures of passengers entering the subway at the central railway station, while some train services in eastern China’s Yangtze River Delta region were suspended, the local railway operator said.

Airports around the world have stepped up screening of passengers from China, though some health officials and experts have questioned the effectiveness of such screenings and of the lockdown.

Health officials fear the transmission rate could accelerate as hundreds of millions of Chinese travel before and during the week-long Lunar New Year holiday, which began on January 25, although many have cancelled their plans, with airlines and railways in China providing free refunds.

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