Engineers in China have developed a robot to treat and test Covid-19 patients while allowing healthcare workers to remain at a safe distance from the highly infectious virus.

The remote-controlled, wheeled machine can take mouth swabs, perform ultrasound scans and listen to organs with a robot stethoscope.

Medical staff can operate the robots from a safe distance using onboard cameras to monitor the patient.

High infection rates among health care workers have hampered efforts to tackle the outbreak, prompting the designers to see if a robot could provide protection.

Robot engineers have long promised their machines will eventually save human workers from dull, dangerous or dirty work. The coronavirus epidemic presents and opportunity to tests what robots may be able to do, some scientists believe.

"Doctors are all very brave," the robot's chief designer, Tsinghua University Professor Zheng Gangtie told Reuters. "But this virus is just too contagious ... We can use robots to perform the most dangerous tasks."

Prof Zheng said the idea came as he watched the Chinese city of Wuhan go on lockdown earlier in the year as the number of cases in China rose rapidly. He said a friend, Dong Jiahong, executive president at Beijing's Tsinghua Changgung Hospital, had told him one of the biggest challenges was frontline workers getting infected.