A new study that brought sniffer dogs to an airport to search for COVID-19 has found that dogs may be able to detect the virus with high accuracy just from smelling skin swabs.
Dogs have been trained to sniff out bombs, drugs and even cancer. Now, a new study has found that dogs may also be able to detect COVID-19 just from smelling skin swabs., researchers in Finland trained four sniffer dogs to pick out whether or not a person had COVID-19, and found that the dogs were 92 per cent accurate.
Since the start of the pandemic, numerous researchers and organizations have theorized that dogs might be able to assist in identifying COVID-19 cases fast by utilizing their superior sense of smell. Several institutions even began to train dogs to identify the scent of the virus.
A skin sample meant a strip of gauze that volunteers had swabbed on their neck, throat area, forehead and wrists. The dogs were able to recognize whether a sample was positive or negative correctly 92 per cent of the time. Out of this large sample size, 303 travellers or airport employees agreed to take part in the validation portion of the experiment and take a PCR test as well as provide a skin swab for the dogs to sniff.
Taken altogether,the research seems to indicate that dogs can be easily trained to identify COVID-19 with a high level of accuracy — something that could be helpful in situations where understanding the positive or negative status of a person quickly is imperative.