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According to a new study, carried out earlier this year by France’s national veterinary school and the clinical research unit of Paris’s Necker-Cochin hospital, dogs are master COVID-19 sniffers.

During the trial, which took place in March and April, the hounds were able to detect the presence of the virus with 97% accuracy, and correctly identify negative samples 91% of the time.

That’s more accurate than many lateral flow tests (LFTs), reports The Guardian:

“These results are scientific confirmation of dogs’ capacity to detect the olfactory signature of Covid-19,” the Paris hospital board said, adding that the study – which is due to be published in a scientific review – was the first of its kind.

“These are excellent results, comparable with those of a PCR test,” Prof Jean-Marc Tréluyer told Agence-France Presse. Tréluyer said dogs would not replace polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, which are significantly more reliable than LFT tests.

Tréluyer hopes that using the dogs could help identify people who should undergo a full viral test, and the speed at which the dogs identify the virus would help greatly with mass testing efforts.

Perhaps we’ll see sniffer dogs at concerts, stadiums, or airports, sussing out those with COVID-19 instead of those with illicit substances on their persons.

According to The Japan Times, the French study is far from the first of its kind:

In July, German researchers showed trained dogs were able to distinguish between saliva sampled from people infected with the virus and those who were not more than 90% of the time.

Finland, Dubai and Switzerland have started training dogs to sniff out infections.

Let’s perhaps get our vaccine rollout sorted before we start looking at training COVID-19 sniffer dogs.

[sources:guardian&japantimes]