13 October 2020

The Nose Knows: Covid-19 Trained SnifferDogs Produce Near 100% Accuracy

That's good news - and it is non-invasive and used from a number of sources. Here's an upload from BBC News last month when the story recently changed. . . Covid-19: Growth in cases may be slowing in England. The growth in cases of coronavirus may be slowing down, the largest study of the infection in England suggests. . ."
So where are the hot spots? Airports

'It's a Game for Them.' Scientists Around the World Are Teaching Dogs to Sniff Out COVID-19

 
OCTOBER 9, 2020 12:11 PM EDT 
Now scientists are hoping that dogs’ keen sense of smell, 10,000 times better than that of humans, can help them identify people carrying COVID-19, too...Their goal: to train coronavirus-sniffing dogs, which could then be deployed at schools, airports and other public venues to reinforce existing nasal swab testing programs. A similar study is underway at the University of Pennsylvania...Other studies have produced promising, albeit early, results. In June, a team in France using a small number of samples collected from human patients who had been tested for COVID-19 in PCR tests (the current gold standard for testing) found a high degree of evidence that dogs could detect COVID-19 infections through differences in the smell of human subjects’ armpit sweat. (Also concluded: dogs don’t particularly mind sniffing people’s armpits.) In Germany, researchers ran a small pilot study, published in July, with trained coronavirus-sniffing dogs—corona-schnüffelnder hunde—and showed that the dogs were able to distinguish between coronavirus-positive samples and a control group with an average sensitivity (the rate of detecting true positives) of 83% and a specificity (true negative rate) of 96% after only one week of training. . ."
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'Close to 100% accuracy': Helsinki airport uses sniffer dogs to detect Covid

Researchers running Helsinki pilot scheme say dogs can identify virus in seconds

 Sniffer dogs used to detect coronavirus in Helsinki airport as part of trial – video
Four Covid-19 sniffer dogs have begun work at Helsinki airport in a state-funded pilot scheme that Finnish researchers hope will provide a cheap, fast and effective alternative method of testing people for the virus.
A dog is capable of detecting the presence of the coronavirus within 10 seconds and the entire process takes less than a minute to complete, according to Anna Hielm-Björkman of the University of Helsinki, who is overseeing the trial.



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