Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt has backed a call from epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson for “rapid testing” to be introduced in schools, using a similar model to that used in Germany.

The Commons Health Committee chairman told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think he is right, and the reason he is right is because we know something now we didn’t know back in January, which is that about 70 per cent of the people who transmit coronavirus don’t have any symptoms at all and so that makes it much harder to get public consent for things like sending people back to school or going back to offices and so on because it is a silent transmitter and even a silent killer sometimes.”

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“The way you get around that is by having very quick, very effective large-scale testing.

“I think, in fairness to the government, it is heading in this direction but we could be much more systematic about it if we really wanted to raise confidence.

“If, for example, we said that every secondary school teacher was going to be tested twice a week, then that would really give people confidence that if they were sending their kids back to school, they weren’t sending them into a zone where they might pick up the virus.”

Mr Hunt said that he thought it was possible to ramp up testing in such a way but that there were concerns around “false positives” - although he said a second test could help rule out such anomalies.