Hong Kong authorities say a patient had received blood from a donor who later tested positive for the coronavirus.

Officials were scrambling to trace what happened to the blood after it emerged that a man who donated on July 5 was later found to be carrying the virus.

“The blood transfusion service has been tracing the blood he donated and for now found that a patient in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital received a platelet transfusion,” Lau Ka-hin, from the city's Hospital Authority told reporters.

It was not clear whether the 35-year-old male recipient had contracted the virus.