Dogs are better at detecting Covid-19 than our usual tests according to new research out of UC Santa Barbara.
The study reviewed 29 research papers involving 400 researchers around the world and over 100 dogs.
Tommy Dickey is a UCSB professor and therapy dog handler. He said the findings show trained scent dogs are just as accurate, if not more, at detecting COVID than commonly used tests.
“Dogs’ smelling systems are a thousand times more sensitive than the best scientific instruments,” Dickey said.
Dogs’ noses have hundreds-of-millions of smell receptors, while humans only have five to six million.
This unique sense of smell allows dogs to detect even the tiniest amounts of the virus. They can also identify asymptomatic, presymptomatic and long Covid, which are rarely picked up by standard tests.
Dickey said this is because dogs have a remarkable ability to recognize individual smells.
“If you have spaghetti as an example, if a dog could talk, a dog would tell you, ‘yeah, that's spaghetti, but it's also got garlic; it’s got tomato sauce; it's got various other ingredients in it,’” Dickey said.
Dickey said dogs can not only spot Covid-19 more accurately than tests; they’re also much quicker. While tests might take 15 minutes, a few hours or even days to show results, dogs can give us an answer instantly.
“A crowd of people are going into an event, and the dogs can walk up and down the line,” Dickey said. “In mere seconds, they can tell if a person has Covid or not.”
Dickey said that dogs are also a more cost-effective option compared to tests, and they don't harm the environment like the plastics used in testing.
Trained scent dogs have proven successful in recognizing other conditions like diabetes and cancer, but their role in Covid-19 detection is a newer area of study.
Dickey hopes his research findings will speed up the use of dogs in mainstream medicine, especially for finding Covid-19 cases.
“They have the potential of screening individuals in mass situations, and maybe down the line, the dogs can be utilized more in clinics,” Dickey said.
