Since last spring therapy dog trainers began teaching canine’s how to sniff out COVID virus from human sweat.  

How dogs are used in medicine at present

After all, we train dogs for many other medical reasons.  Dogs help people with visual impairments.   They are used as companions and encourage socialization in people with cognitive challenges.  Dogs can be trained to predict and proactively intervene to prevent their human from having a seizure.  They are used in long-term care to comfort residents.  They use canine scent detection to ensure effective cleaning in hospitals from “super bugs” or antibiotic resistant organisms.  Now, it seems non-invasive  COVID diagnosis may be added to dog’s human helping abilities. 

How accurate is a dog’s COVID detection?

Even though just a small amount of dog’s have been trained and tested to detect COVID, they did so with 100% accuracy!  Those are pretty convincing, overwhelming results.  Even with a  small sample size.

How do they train COVID Detection Dog’s

Can I get diagnosed by a COVID dog instead of a COVID swab?

Dog COVID detection is still in the earliest phases of development, even though it shows very promising results, sample sizes are very small. It is more likely, that dogs will be used first to detect COVID in airports as travel restrictions are lifted world wide, rather than for individual testing in a clinical setting.

“It’s important not to go out too early with grand claims and small data sets,” James Logan, a professor and head of the department of disease control at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told Nature last month.

“In a few cases, dogs have been known to get infected with the coronavirus, the study said, but, according to the US Centers for Disease Control, there is no evidence that animals, including dogs, play any significant role in spreading Covid-19.” For safety, the researchers did not use any samples for training or testing the dogs within 24 hours of collection.

Perhaps we can look forward to canine detection for COVID in the future as they become more widely trained.  Even  with COVID vaccines on the horizon, there will always be a role for dog’s to “work” in our world. 

References

Scent dog identification of samples from COVID-19 patients – a pilot study

Can dogs smell COVID? Here’s what the science says

Kennel Cough is on the Rise in Canadian Dogs among the COVID Human Pandemic

Discover more about Canine Kennel Cough spreading during the human COVID Pandemic.