Dogs More Effective Than PCR Tests At Detecting COVID

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Scientists and public health officials have been looking at all different kinds of alternatives to individual rapid COVID-19 tests to detect the presence of the virus, and in their search, they’ve landed on some strange alternatives. Some have resorted to testing poop in public sewers to detect traces of the virus, a method that has proven reliable in detecting outbreaks.

And as it happens, dogs – which have been used to sniff out everything from drugs to bombs – are also effective at sniffing out COVID-19, according to a new French study published by Bloomberg.

The dogs’ ability to detect the virus was clocked at 97% sensitivity, a level that puts this method on par with the most reliable rapid antigen tests. The sniffing method was also found to be 91% specific – a technical measure of the dogs’ ability to correctly identify negative samples. This ‘sensitivity rating’ is higher than that of many 15-minute antigen tests, which tend to be better at ruling out infection than at finding it.

And with Europe reopening its economy to vaccinated tourists on Wednesday, these study results couldn’t have come at a better time. As Bloomberg points out, virus-sniffing dogs could be widely deployed in airports, train stations or anywhere crowds amass to screen people, much like they’re used for detecting drugs or bombs. Using dogs also means COVID could be identified at just a fraction of a second in a non-invasive manner, and in an extremely inexpensive manner (in theory, it wouldn’t cost all that much to train the dogs, and the methods would be simple to those used to train drug and bomb-sniffing dogs).- READ MORE

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