Study shows dogs can detect COVID-positive arrivals at airports

The dogs needed to be trained not to identify "false positives" in a bid to hack their reward system and obtain treats even if there were no Covid-19 samples in a given test. "This means that the dog fully understands and gets a reward for a correct negative as well as a correct positive," said Claire Guest, from the school's Faculty of Infectious and Tropical Diseases. Overall, the dogs were successfully able to identify between 94 and 82 percent of SARS-CoV-2 samples. The researchers then modelled how effectively these success rates, combined with traditional PCR tests, could help detect mild or asymptomatic Covid-19 cases. They found that using dogs to screen arrivals at terminuses such as airports could detect 91 percent of cases, resulting in a 2.24 times lower rate of transmission than with PCR tests alone.