Let \(\Gamma\) be a finitely generated residually finite group, \(\{\Gamma_n\}_{n=1}^\infty\) a sequence of finite index normal subgroups of \(\Gamma\) such that \(\Gamma_n\supset\Gamma_{n+1}\) and \(\bigcap_{n=1}^\infty\Gamma_n=\{e\}\). It is proved that the strong Novikov conjecture for \(\Gamma\) is essentially equivalent to the coarse geometric Novikov conjecture for the box metric space \(\bigsqcup_{n=1}^\infty\Gamma/\Gamma_n\).
As a corollary, it is shown that the coarse geometric Novikov conjecture holds for sequences of expanders of some property (T) groups which are not coarsely embeddable into any uniformly convex Banach space.