
Scent dog identification of samples from Covid-19 patients – a pilot study - helloworld
https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-020-05281-3
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djrogers
This seems like a much more useful screening method than taking people’s
forehead temperature at the door. Plus, you can have a dog wander around
performing constant passive screening.

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tqi
The study seems to have been conducted on prepared samples of saliva, so not
sure if that would translate to working in the field.

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ruffrey
I wonder if this puts dogs at risk for contracting or spreading the virus.

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hlfy_hn
AFAIK most dogs can't get Corona (for now). Dogs that have tested positive for
corona are rare. There is no report from Dog to human infection.

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topkai22
Rare, but this method is asking them to smell saliva samples all day. That’s a
level of exposure very few dogs would have.

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obilgic
6% error rate is kinda high imho if this becomes the main method for airports
etc, given the possible consequences of testing positive at customs.

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topkai22
6% seems amazing if you can enable mass screenings at, for example, schools.

As for consequences, you’d presumably be isolated until a secondary test could
confirm the results. That’s better than a 14 day quarantine for everyone
coming into a region, as many places are “requiring” in the US.

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treeman79
First positive case at a school is gonna have a lot of people sent home.

Our school it was. The entire classroom The teacher All secondary teachers /
aids that kid interacted with. Possibly the kids the secondary personal
interacted with. After 14 days everyone allowed back. Repeat each time a kid
gets sick.

So with high false positives, everyone would be in quarantine perpetually.

General opinion was school would open, then very quickly get shut down.

Finally school just went 100% virtual. Except teachers have to come in and
teach virtual lessons. Oh and they have to wear a mask while teaching lessons
to the virtual audience. This is for kindergarten. So parents will have to be
with kid 100% of the time or it’s all a waste.

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js2
See also:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542335](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542335)

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msandford
It's hard to imagine a cheaper test than this! I'm not sure I like the
sociological conditioning or normalization that would happen with large-scale
dog "testing" rollouts through society. But I can't deny that something like
this would allow a lot of life to go back to normal and that would be a very
good thing.

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hlfy_hn
"It's hard to imagine a cheaper test than this! "

ROTFL. Do you know what a working dog costs? Good luck with that. But you
could try to build an artificial nose based on the headspace.

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msandford
Do they cost millions of dollars? I suspect not.

If you need to screen thousands of people per day as they're say, all going to
the grocery store, or the office, or whatever, it doesn't take too many days
of several thousand "tests" per day times say $1 per test to come up with $10k
or $20k.

If a well trained dog that can do the test is $100k then yes you're starting
to talk about an equivalently priced test to those already in the marketplace.

Covid tests require a significant amount of human and machine time such that
they cost tens of dollars right now. I suspect that dogs could bring that down
by an order of magnitude or more.

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hlfy_hn
Such a do should cost you about USD$ 10k, possibly more for a Corona detection
dog since it has to be trained in a dangerous environment. You need a dog
handler. The dog is not able to work 8h a day and sniff out samples non-stop.
Honestly I don't know how many hours a day the dog could perform. 3 hours may
be realistic. So how many people can the dog smell in an hour? 60?

Taking into account he costs (dogs, transport, dog handler etc.) it does not
seem to be a cost effective solution. Yes, fogs were used to detect
pregnancies but we don't do this anymore.

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stevage
They didn't mention what kind of dogs they use. Beagles?

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relbeek2
Friend of the family uses labradoodle’s exclusively for scent dogs.

