Dogs might be able to sniff out coronavirus cases before they're diagnosed

Dogs have sniffed out bombs, drugs, cancer, and now possibly coronavirus.

Countries around the world have been training dogs to see if they can associate COVID-19 with a certain smell and point out the disease even if someone hasn't tested positive for it. And in Germany, pups are showing promising results with minimal training, Bloomberg reports.

Eight dogs from Germany's armed forces spent just a week training to identify the smell of COVID-19 in a person's saliva in a study for the University of Veterinary Medicine Hanover. They then were tasked with smelling the saliva of more than 1,000 sick and healthy people, and identified those with coronavirus infections 94 percent of the time. "We think that this works because the metabolic processes in the body of a diseased patient are completely changed," and dogs can smell the difference, professor Maren von Koeckritz-Blickwede explained.

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Dogs in France similarly had a 95 percent success rate when smelling sweat samples for COVID-19. And in Chile, police dogs are being trained to potentially sniff out coronavirus on people. All these efforts are happening with the hopes that they can be deployed in large crowds and track down infected people before they spread the virus too far.