Finland Deploys COVID-19 Sniffer Dogs At The Airport

We’ve all seen how dogs are deployed at checkpoints along the border or at airports to help sniff out drugs and other illegal substances that people should not be bringing into a country, but could sniffer dogs also be used to sniff out diseases in people, like the coronavirus? Apparently so, or that’s what Finnish researchers believe.

It seems that researchers from the country have high hopes of the effectiveness of sniffer dogs at detecting the coronavirus, so much so that they have deployed four of them at the Helsinki airport where based on preliminary tests, the dogs were able to sniff out the virus in people with “nearly 100%” accuracy, even if the person has not developed any symptoms.

When a dog thinks that a person has the virus, it will then either start to yelp, paw at the ground, or lie down, after which the person is then given a PCR test to help verify the dog’s suspicions. At the moment it is unclear what it is that dogs can smell that might give them an indication that a person has the coronavirus.

It has been speculated that it could be in the sweat, where the odor might differ from a person without the virus. The idea of using dogs isn’t new and back in July, we heard that dogs in Spain were also being similarly trained.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Coronavirus, covid-19