Chile training four dogs to sniff out infected COVID-19 patients

Three golden retrievers and one Labrador in Chile are being trained to detect people infected with COVID-19. According to reports, while the deadly coronavirus has no smell, the virus causes a change in a person’s body and that can be picked up in their sweat and that is what the dogs are all being trained for.

Sniffing out infected sweat

As per reports, before being re-trained for the purpose of sniffing out people infected with the coronavirus the dogs use to sniff out drugs, explosives and also on occasion lost people. The training program for the 4 dogs is a joint effort by Chile's national police, the Carabineros, and specialists at the Universidad Catolica de Chile.

According to reports, the program to re-train these dogs is not a wholly new one, there are similar programs that are taking place in other countries such as France based on the same principles. Dogs have roughly 330 million olfactory receptors and this means they have a sense of smell that is 50 times better than humans and the dogs can also sniff 250 humans an hour and tell if they are infected or not.

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As per reports, the test conducted have demonstrated that this method has a success rate of 95 per cent in locating individuals who have been infected by the COVID-19 virus. Experts believe that in the best case scenario’s the dogs will be trained and deployed with their handlers to paces such as train stations and bus stops by August of this year.

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Chile has reported 321,205 positive coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic according to the John Hopkins coronavirus resource centre, the country has also reported over 7,000 virus-related deaths. COVID-19 pandemic started in China late last year and has since then infected over 13.4 million people worldwide and the global death toll stands at 580,552.