Everyone living or working in the city will be offered them - whether they have symptoms or not.

The aim is to limit spread of the virus by identifying as many infected people as possible, and taking action to break chains of transmission.

The pilot will start this week and will include a mix of existing swab tests and new lateral flow tests, which can provide a result within an hour without the need to use a lab.

New test sites will be set up across the city, including in care homes, schools, universities and workplaces. People will be able to book online, turn up in person, or wait for an invitation from the local authority.

Around 2,000 military personnel will help to plan the logistics of the pilot, and to deliver tests across the city.

James Gallagher (Health Correspondent)

There are questions regarding both the tests used and the strategy as a whole.

Rapid or "lateral flow" tests need high levels of the virus in the body in order to work. It is not yet clear how good they are at catching people in the early stages of the infection when the virus is still taking hold.

False positives - when you don't have the virus, but the test says you do - are also a bigger problem when you test large numbers of people. One analysis suggested a twice-a-week test for six months using a test with a 1% false positive rate would lead to more than 40% of people being wrongly told they had the virus.

There is already an issue with too few people fully isolating even when they have Covid symptoms and have tested positive. Will people isolate when they have no symptoms at all or will they even come forward for testing if it might mean missing work and pay?

The UK's first attempt at city-wide testing will help find the answers.

Liverpool has been the first part of the country to trial mass testing for all - including those who do not have COVID-19 symptoms.

Lateral flow tests, which use similar technology to a pregnancy test and have a turnaround time of under an hour, have been available since Friday for people who live and work in the city.

And Health Secretary Matt Hancock revealed he is now aiming to roll-out similar schemes across England and the rest of the UK.

"I can confirm that we are rolling out the sort of mass testing that we are seeing in Liverpool - and indeed we earlier piloted in Stoke-on-Trent - across 66 different local authorities," he told Sky News.

"Last night I wrote to the directors of public health of all local authorities in England, saying that we could make available these brilliant new lateral flow tests that give you the result in 15 minutes.

"Sixty-six expressed an interest in the first instance, I'm now expecting a whole load more.

Mayor Joe Anderson has provided an update from the first few days of the 'moonshot' mass testing programme in the city. He said that a total of 23,170 people had come forward for tests since the programme got going at noon on Friday. And he said that of this number, roughly 0.7% has tested positive.

This means around 154 of those coming forward for the asymptomatic testing - who otherwise were unlikely to have got a test - have been told that they have covid-19 and need to self-isolate. The hope is that by identifying those carrying the virus without symptoms and asking them to isolate, the infection level can be brought down, with transmission chains cut.

Since then, 430 people have tested positive, with about 200 showing prior symptoms, Mayor Joe Anderson said.

Officials initially said the mass testing pilot would run for two weeks in the city but it will now continue for a month at least, Mr Anderson said.

A Liverpool City Council spokesman said: "The pilot will end when enough is known about how to maximise the public benefit from this project."

Public Health England director Dr Susan Hopkins said nearly 100,000 people had been tested over the last 10 days. She stressed that these positive cases would have not been detected otherwise.