Schools in Massachusetts use dogs to sniff out Covid cases

Scientists say dogs are trained to be 99 per cent accurate in detecting virus

Schools in Massachusetts are using dogs to sniff out Covid-19 in classrooms.

The two police K-9s have been trained by the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office to detect Covid cases and will go to work in the Freetown, Lakeville and Norton school districts.

Huntah and Duke, both one-year-old Labradors, will sit down to alert staff when they pick up the scent of Covid so that the area can be cleaned.

“With Covid whether it’s the Omicron, whether it’s the Delta, our dogs will hit on it,” said Bristol County Captain Paul Douglas.

“And if there’s a new variant that comes out in six months, hopefully there isn’t, but if there is one, Covid is Covid.”

And he added: “We’ll go right into the classroom if the students are in there, and our dogs actually work right through it.

“They just walk right through, they go over the backpacks, around the teachers.”

Fairhaven School Superintendent Tara Kohler said they were pleased to have the dogs working at the schools.

“I see it as a great opportunity for kids to recognise that we are doing everything we can to mitigate the risk and I want them to feel secure and safe and not anxious about their surroundings,” Ms Kohler said.

The detection programme was developed by Florida International University’s International Forensic Research Institute, which says that the dogs are 99 per cent accurate in detecting the virus.

Dogs’ noses contain 30 million scent receptors, compared with humans’ 5-6 million, which allow them to detect minute concentrations of odour that people cannot, according to the journal Nature.