Dogs Can Smell Covid-19 Infection

Can dogs sniff out COVID-19 infections? Here’s what the research says!

Timestamps

0:00 Introduction

0:12 Studies on dogs detecting COVID-19 infections

1:13 Sense of smell: humans vs. dogs

1:40 Bulletproof your immune system *free course!

In this video, we’re going to talk about some interesting studies on dogs’ ability to smell COVID-19 infections.

With just a few sniffs, dogs were able to identify infected people (with or without symptoms) with close to perfect accuracy. Another German study found that dogs were able to detect COVID-19 infections with 94% accuracy.

The University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine found that dogs could detect covid infections with 95% accuracy. Studies in the United Arab Emirates discovered that dogs could detect covid cases days before conventional tests were able to pick up on the virus.

Why can dogs pick up on COVID-19 infections so easily? Well, dogs’ noses have 300 minion scent receptors. This is 60x more than the average human, which has only 5 million scent receptors.

Some dogs can even detect certain types of cancer. Pathogens can emit specific odors that we can’t detect with our noses, but dogs seem to detect them with ease.

DATA:

https://www.finavia.fi/en/newsroom/2020/covid-19-dogs-arrive-airport-able-identify-virus-earlier-laboratory-tests

https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-020-05281-3

https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-vet-launches-covid-19-canine-scent-detection-study

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33301539/

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2019/sniffer-dogs-could-detect-malaria-people

https://time.com/5898049/covid-19-sniffing-dogs/