Dogs Can Smell COVID-19

According to Nature.com, canines around the world are being trained to detect the whiff of COVID-19 infections. Scientists involved with the efforts suggest that canines could help to control the pandemic because they can screen hundreds of people an hour in busy places such as airports or sports stadiums, and are cheaper to run than conventional testing methods.

Dogs have already been used on a trial basis in Helsinki, Finland, at the airport to detect COVID-19 on incoming passengers. As part of a four month pilot project, anyone who the dogs identify as positive, is requested to go to the medical unit for confirmation according to DW.com. 

According to newseu.cgtn.com, COVID-19 sniffer dogs may be only four to six weeks away in Italy. A group called Medical Detection Dogs Italy has been training the animals to detect the coronavirus, like they would for cancer and diabetes. 

Before the dogs can be used on a large scale, more testing needs to happen. Fyodor Urnov, a gene-editing scientist who is working on coronavirus testing at the University of California, Berkeley, admitted, “There is variation in how well individual dogs perform. In one study, for example, two dogs identified 68 out of 68 positive samples, whereas one missed 10 out of 57 cases.”