Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the centre for evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, has said the Government lockdown was likely to do more damage than coronavirus itself.
The practising GP told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that too much attention had been paid to prediction models that often proved to be 'some way out' and that not enough testing had been carried out.
He said: "The key is no-one has really understood how many people actually have the infection.
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"You could do that really quickly with random sampling of a thousand people in London who thought they had the symptoms."
He added: "You could do that in the next couple of days and get a really key handle on that problem and we'd be able to then understand coming out of lockdown much quicker.
"In fact, the damaging effect now of lockdown is going to outweigh the damaging effect of coronavirus."
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