Dogs were already man’s best friend and if you were lucky enough to own one before COVID-19 hit then you’re likely reaping the rewards of all this increased stay-at-home bonding time that you now find yourself with. But soon it may turn out that dogs can do even more than just entertain us during a quarantine. They may even be able to help stop COVID-19 from spreading in the first place!
Our canine friends would pull off this fancy feat by sniffing out tell-tale signs of the virus, identifying those people who may be so-called super-spreaders – asymptotic people who move freely throughout society, unaware that they are even sick.
According to Fortune, “The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine is crowdfunding a project to train canines to detect healthy-seeming people who haven’t necessarily realized yet they are carriers. If the project is successful, the animal detectives could be working across Britain by the summer.
‘It’s very early stages,’ says James Logan, head of LSHTM’s Department of Disease Control. ‘We know diseases have odor —including respiratory diseases such as influenza—and that those odors are in fact quite distinct. There is a very, very good chance that COVID-19 has a specific odor, and if it does I am really confident that the dogs would be able to learn that smell and detect it.'”
If they can, it would’t be the first time that dogs have come to our rescue. And, no, I’m not referring to Lassie.
I’m referring to “Doctor Dogs” that have been trained to detect everything from cancer to malaria. Something that evolution has fine-tuned them for.
As NBC reports:
“[Author Maria] Goodavage noted that while humans have around 6 million olfactory receptors, dogs can have up to 300 million, giving them a nose up in scent detection.
‘They’re detecting these diseases that until recently we didn’t even realize had a scent,’ she said. ‘They can pick up many things around the world, like different kinds of cancers. So far, they’ve detected breast, ovarian, lung, bladder, stomach, liver, prostate and skin — a bunch.’
In some cases, the dogs don’t detect cancer from tissue samples but from blood, saliva or even breath.'”
Hopefully, this research continues to progress and we really do wind up having dogs on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19. Because at this rate we need all the help we can get. It’s an all hands, er, paws, on deck situation.
Is using dogs to detect COVID–19 the Greatest Idea Ever?
Greatest. Idea. Ever. 
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