Trained Dogs Can Smell COVID-19

Not only can our puppers be trained to sniff out diseases like cancer and malaria but now dogs can be trained to sniff out the virus that has upended everybody's lives across the globe.

In an article published cnbc.com, results of a recent study show that using man's best friend could help us detect who has COVID-19 and who doesn't.

The study, published in BMC Infectious Diseases on July 23, 2020, was looking to see if dogs could in fact pick up on COVID-19 in humans as a way to produce real-time identification.

A lot of requirements are needed now in order to even get a COVID-19 test.  Additionally, getting back results can take days.  Having the ability to train dogs to detect the virus could help detect and control the coronavirus easier and faster.

In the study, eight dogs were trained for one week using saliva or 'tracheobronchial secretions' of infected COVID-19 patients. The results showed the dogs were able to discern between the infected and non-infected samples (COVID-19 positive and negative, respectively) with an overall detection rate around 94% out of over 1000 random samples.

Breaking that down, they were able to detect 157 positive corona cases and able to discern 792 negative COVID-19 samples.  There were 33 samples that were positive that the dogs didn't pick up on.

Using trained dogs would be an additional tool for COVID-19 detection during the pandemic to have an additional screening method to combat the spread of the coronavirus.