With their superior nose power, dogs have been trained to sniff out various diseases, including diabetes, malaria and tuberculosis. Now, new preliminary research led by the University of Veterinary Medicine, Hannover, suggests that pups could also detect when people are infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19…

In this study, it took one week to train eight sniffer dogs to detect the virus, by presenting them with saliva samples and swabs taken from COVID-19 patients, as well as healthy people with no history of the disease.

After training, the dogs were presented with 1,012 randomised samples, and they correctly identified 157 positive samples and 792 negative samples, for an overall detection rate of 94 per cent.

Bet folks could charge less for the test, too. Say, a couple dog cookies for each test. A few buck$ to the handler, record-keeper.