Can sniffer dogs help to detect COVID-19 positive patients? Might soon be a reality at airports

As the world is busy devising ways in which we can continue living in the new era of COVID-19, here is a possible new way to screen patients. According to reports, medical detection dogs could be used to help screen COVID-19 positive patients. This means that your next visit to the airport could entail a sniffer dog checking on you for the virus.
Numerous medical institutions around the world are currently working on finding ways to work with dogs. Iran, for example, has already begun training sniffer dogs to detect COVID-19. The training programme by Iran is being supported by the military. Currently, they are unsure which breed of dogs is best for the job of detecting COVID-19, so they are working with different breeds of dogs.


Furthermore, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Medical Detection Dogs, and Durham University have collaborated to work on something similar. They have come together to train dogs to detect malaria. Hence, it is their belief that detection dogs can be an added method to ongoing tests through which COVID-19 can be detected in a person. The dogs could help to increase the testing frequency up to 250 people in an hour.
According to reports, the dogs need to be trained to sniff samples of COVID-19 (if COVID-19 has a specific smell), and then they would have to indicate those that have the infection. These detection dogs can also tell when there are minor changes in the skin temperature of an individual, so people with fever can be detected. These dogs, when used at airports, can help to stop the spread of the virus, and thus contain the number of affected patients globally.

Hopefully we can soon find ways to detect the disease, and help to curb the spread.