Jeremy Hunt has called for a renewed push on ‘contact tracing’ to give the government a potential route out of the Coronavirus lockdown.
The former Health Secretary called on ministers to appoint a ‘contact tracing tsar’ - an expert outside of politics to take charge of the strategy.
Contact tracing involves tracking down as many people as possible who have come into contact with a person confirmed to have caught Covid-19.
Mr Hunt said contact tracing should be the UK’s next “national mission.”
In an online video, he said: “The countries that have had the biggest success in keeping coronavirus deaths low are places like Korea and Germany that haven’t just done a lot of testing, they’ve used the data from testing to track down people who’ve had the virus, people they’ve been in contact with and isolate and quarantine them as well.
“And if we are going to use the extra capacity that we now have in testing, which is so welcome, this is the way to do it.”
He said such a programme could be undertaken nationally through Public Health England or locally through local councils.
And he said consideration should be given to “feet on the ground” methods of tracing as well as technology like smartphone apps.
Mr Hunt also suggested the government could lift the lockdown in areas with “low transmission” in order to test the contact tracing system without undermining the national lockdown messages.
Urging the government to appoint a single person to head up the project, Mr Hunt said: “There are lots of people who can do this, but I hope we will get a move on so that the cabinet has a choice to the current national lockdown when they come to review this decision in just under 3 weeks time.”
The World Health Organisation’s advice on lifting lockdown measures recommends that a country must have the capacity to "detect, test, isolate and treat" every case and trace every contact.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock said at the Commons health committee on Friday that the government is working “incredibly hard” to develop a way to do this.
"We do need to have comprehensive test, track and trace in place as soon as possible," he said.
"And we need to get the technology right, we need to have the people and we're building that resource and obviously we need to have the testing and we're ramping that up as well.
"So we do need to have all three of those in place and we're working incredibly hard to make sure that we are."
The government plans to release a smartphone app which uses bluetooth to keep an anonymous log of every person an individual has been in close contact with and alert them if one should test positive for Covid-19.
While the technology has been welcomed as one potential solution to ease in a return to normality, it has also been met with concern for the public's privacy.
Speaking on the BBC News Channel, Mr Hunt said: "A test is not a cure, a test gives you vital information as to where the virus is in the community so you can track it and trace everyone who's been near the person who had it.
"And that means that you don't have to lock down because in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, they've kept the offices open, the shops are open, the shopping malls are open and normal life is able to continue much more than it is able to do at the moment in the UK."
He added that "this is a virus that could come back, that could come back in waves".
Mr Hunt said: "And so we can put this mass community testing in place with the contact tracing and next time it comes back we won't need to have this kind of lockdown and people will be able to carry on going to work as they're doing in Taiwan and Korea."
In response to Professor Costello's suggestion that incentives could be used to persuade some people to remain isolating, Mr Hunt said: "Well I think we need to look at all these things and follow what has worked best across the world."
