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Sniff tests The study included dogs from French fire stations and from the Ministry of the Interior of the United Arab Emirates on the Persian Gulf. The researchers trained the animals to detect coronavirus by rewarding them with toys — usually tennis balls. “It’s playtime for them,” Grandjean says. It takes about three to six weeks to train a dog to pick out COVID-19 cases from sweat samples. How long it takes depends on the dog’s experience at detecting scents. The dogs then sniffed cones housing samples of sweat that had been collected from the underarms of volunteers. Sweat swabbed off the back of people’s necks worked, too. Even a whiff of used face masks worked well, Grandjean says. These results show that odors from any of multiple sites on the body can be used for canine screening, says Kenneth Furton. He is a forensic chemist at Florida International University in Miami. Although Furton did not take part in the new study, he has tested dogs at detecting COVID-19. The new results are similar to previous, smaller studies, he notes. Both show that dogs perform as well as or even better than PCR tests for detecting SARS-CoV-2. That’s the virus that causes COVID-19. He and his team have used dogs at schools and a music festival. They even did a small trial to screen airline employees for COVID-19.

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