In a recent pilot program at Miami International Airport, two COVID-sniffing canines were found to be more than 99% accurate in detecting the virus in their training.
A pair of dogs, named Cobra– a Belgian Malinois, and One Betta– a Dutch Shepard, who had been trained in the Florida International University Forensic and Justice Center, started a 30-day program last week, which detects COVID-19 among airport workers.
On Monday, Florida International University’s Kenneth Furton told CNN’s New Day, that “We trained these dogs just using face coverings from patients, who, at a hospital, have COVID and those who do not.”
Due to COVID’s metabolic alterations, Cobra and One Betta are able to detect the virus in an infected person’s breath and sweat.
The dogs were reported to identify COVID-19 96 to 99 percent of the time in published, peer-reviewed, double-blind experiments.
One Betta’s accuracy rate is 98.1 percent, whereas Cobra’s is 99.4 percent.
“The big ‘aha’ for me was not only could the dogs be trained for this work, but that they were so accurate,” Furton told the Washington Post last week. “Everybody, including humans, are wrong at some point. But [Cobra’s] almost never wrong,” he added.
The two dogs will be stationed at an employee security checkpoint, sniffing the masks of each employee in order to detect the virus.
According to Furton, if an employee is found to have COVID, they will be subjected to a PCR test and will have to wait for the rest results before returning to work.
The dogs are already hard at work, and sniff tests have shown that they can reliably detect the virus.
“We had one employee, for example, who Cobra alerted to, and it turned out they had just recovered COVID-19,” Furton said.
Researchers will analyze the data when the pilot program is completed, according to Furton, and decide whether the canines will be used to detect the virus among passengers, which might assist in preventing travelers who may be lying about viral exposure or infection status.
Cobra and One Betta were chosen for the program because they were previously trained for agricultural detection and were proved to be reliable at smelling out laurel wilt.
It only took the dogs a few weeks to become adept at detecting the new odor, according to Fulton.
The two canines were deployed to Governor Ron DeSantis’ emergency operations center to search for contaminated surfaces, as well as the South Beach Food and Wine Festival to hunt for infected individuals for their real-world training.
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