The Finnish dogs win!
In late September, Finland launched a pilot program using dogs to detect travelers carrying COVID-19 at the Helsinki airport!
Of course, we can’t go there right now, so we cannot see the dogs in action (yet).
Several organizations in the U.S. are also training COVID-sniffing dogs, but the Finns got there first.
The dogs will sniff samples voluntarily provided by arriving airline passengers, and the passengers and dogs will have no contact. This is a good model, since some people are afraid of — or allergic to — dogs.
The dogs are extremely accurate, and can even detect COVID-19 before the standard testing can: Anna Hielm-Björkman, one of the researchers, said that the dogs may be better at spotting coronavirus infections than PCR and antibody tests. They “can also find [people] that are not yet PCR positive but will become PCR positive within a week,” she said.
Dogs’ noses are truly amazing, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what they can do!
The Thinking Dog 
[…] Dogs who detect COVID are in the news; but fewer people are aware of dogs’ ability to detect several types of cancer, as well as diabetics’ sugar highs and lows. Goodavage even has wonderful stories of dogs who detect their human partners’ impending seizures or cardiac incidents … […]
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