Taiwan has said it is investigating whether a mouse bite may have been responsible for a worker at a high-security laboratory testing positive for the coronavirus, the island's first local infection in weeks.

Health officials are scrambling to work out how a female employee at Academia Sinica, Taiwan's top research institute, contracted the virus last month.

Health officials have confirmed that the positive-testing lab worker had been bitten twice by mice that had been infected with the coronavirus. But they said they were still trying to work out if that was the cause of the infection or if it was picked up elsewhere in the lab.