A
new weapon against coronavirus has emerged in the form of dogs, faster than PCR
and more authoritative than rapid tests.
It’s
hard to believe, but people infected with the coronavirus develop a specific
odor that highly trained dogs can accurately identify.
This
claim was made in a new study conducted in the UK according to which trained
dogs can identify 90% of cases of COVID-19 even if the patient has no symptoms.
The
study, by experts from the London School of Hygiene and Tropic Medicine, was
published on a pre-printed server.
The
results add to the evidence that dogs can smell the virus.
In
the study, experts tasked dogs with sniffing the socks of 200 patients with COVID-19
to see which dogs could identify COVID-19 and which did not.
Dogs
have 220 million receptors in their senses (humans have only 5 million
receptors) and can detect a smell 100,000 times more accurately than humans.
Dogs’
noses can also smell a drop of material in 3 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Dogs
have previously successfully sniffed out various types of cancer, malaria, and
other diseases.
Researchers
believe that dogs can play an important role in identifying COVID cases in
different situations.
“The
important thing is that dogs can do this faster than other tests,” he
said.
“We
say dogs should be used as a means of initial screening and then PCR tests on
suspected patients,” he added.
Six
dogs were included in the study and they identified 94.3% of the infected
patients’ socks correctly, meaning they could identify 94 out of every 100
patients.
In
contrast, the rate of rapid tests is 58 to 77 percent while that of PCR tests
is 97.2 percent.
However,
dogs outperform PCR tests in speed because they can diagnose the disease in a
second.
According
to researchers, dogs also catch the disease in people who do not show symptoms
or have a very low viral load.
Dogs
need 8 to 10 weeks of training to diagnose COVID-19, experts say.
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