COVID-19 Detection Dogs

Faster than PCR and more accurate than lateral flow tests (RAT), the latest tool against COVID-19 has four legs and a wet nose.

Recent studies investigating whether or not dogs could differentiate between COVID-positive samples and COVID-negative samples have shown that properly trained dogs could detect COVID-19 on clothing worn by infected people with up to 94.3% sensitivity: showing that they would correctly identify 94 out of every 100 infected people.* This compares with a sensitivity of 58-77% for RAT tests, and 97.2% for PCR tests. Dogs beat PCR tests on speed, making a diagnosis in under a second and were less invasive than a nasal swab. Furthermore, the study showed that the dogs were able to identify people who are asymptomatic and also those people with a low viral load.

Dogs:

A Good Keen Nose

People who are ill give off a distinct odour, which highly trained dogs can detect with pinpoint precision (e.g. cancer detection dogs). This also applies to people infected with viruses. When it comes to COVID-19 detection, researchers don’t know for sure what the dogs are smelling but work is now under way to identify which volatile organic compounds (VOCs) the dogs are detecting.

The volatile organic compounds (VOCs) given off in the sweat samples are a complex mix, so it’s likely the dogs are detecting a particular profile rather than an individual compound.

Sweat is used for these tests as it’s not considered to be a carrier of the COVID-19 virus. This means it presents less risk when handling samples. In experimental studies, it has been shown that canines are not able to replicate the virus (within their body) and are therefore not susceptible to catching COVID-19.

COVID-19 Detection Dogs in the Workplace

This pandemic has been a huge challenge for everyone – and you won’t want to play roulette with COVID-19 infecting your workforce. Being able to rapidly screen and identify asymptomatic employees in the workplace would be a game-changer for many businesses working under time and labour critical restraints.

ScentTECH has trained its detector dogs to sniff out the coronavirus using sweat samples from people infected with COVID-19. When introduced to a line of sweat samples, the dogs can detect a positive one from a line of negative ones with 97% accuracy (10 blind trials involving 1200 samples). The incidents of false positives (signaling a sample is positive when it’s negative) and false negatives (signalling the sample is negative when it’s positive) in these dogs was determined to be 2 and 0 % respectively.

Accurate as they are, dogs will never replace RAT or PCR tests. Those individuals identified by the dog would require a confirmatory test – but this would inconvenience far fewer people than requiring the entire workforce to undergo a screening test.

If you have more than 30 staff or more, you may want to consider Canine COVID-19 detection as a viable option. To screen 30 people, the costs are approximately the same as RAT testing, however the dog has greater accuracy and, most impressively, they take less than a minute to complete the task.

*Guest C, et.al. Using trained dogs and organic semi-conducting sensors to identify asymptomatic and mild SARS-CoV-2 infections: an observational study. J Travel Med. 2022 Mar 24.