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

A dog is trained to sniff out coronavirus.

(Image credit: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)

published 24 July 2020

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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Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.

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