A major British city should be used to trial mass testing as a way out of the coronavirus lockdown, according to a group of leading epidemiologists and public health experts.

They warn that simply using periods of mass lockdowns and relaxations to control the virus could lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people before a vaccine becomes available “with the most disadvantaged groups experiencing the greatest suffering”.

Instead, the group states that one or more cities with a population of 200,000 to 300,000 – about a dozen ranging in size from Aberdeen to Bradford – should be used to trial a mass-testing programme. The group includes Julian Peto, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, David Hunter, professor of epidemiology at the University of Oxford, and Nisreen A Alwan, an associate professor in public health at Southampton University.

“Quarantine would end when all residents of the household test negative at the same time. Everyone else in the city can resume normal life, if they choose to,” said the group in a letter to the Lancet journal. “A decision to proceed with national roll-out can then be made. If the epidemic is controlled, hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved, intensive care units will no longer be overloaded, and the effects of lockdown on mental ill-health and unemployment will end.”

It comes amid continuing doubts about how the government came to its testing target of 100,000 a day by the end of the month. Medical experts and scientists have suggested that it is both too big for the current demand from key workers who think they are infected, and too low to be useful for a mass “test and trace” strategy to loosen the lockdown.

Allan Wilson, president of the Institute of Biomedical Science (IBMS) which represents NHS lab staff and biomedical scientists, said there “was no evidence base” to the figure. He said: “No one, as far as I can see, has built it up from the bottom, depending on predicted demand. It’s not an easy thing to do, but even looking at various scenarios would help.”