Dog Savior: Immediate Scent-Detection of SARS-COV-2 by Trained Dogs

Vesga, Omar; Valencia, Andres F.; Mira, Alejandro; Ossa, Felipe; Ocampo, Esteban; Agudelo, Maria; Čiuoderis, Karl; Perez, Laura; Cardona, Andres; Aguilar, Yudy; González, Javier M.; Cataño, Juan C.; Agudelo, Yuli; Hernández-Ortiz, Juan P.; Osorio, Jorge E.

Molecular tests for viral diagnostics are essential to confront the COVID-19 pandemic, but their production and distribution cannot satisfy the current high demand. Early identification of infected people and their contacts is the key to being able to isolate them and prevent the dissemination of the pathogen; unfortunately, most countries are unable to do this due to the lack of diagnostic tools. Dogs can identify, with a high rate of precision, unique odors of volatile organic compounds generated during an infection; as a result, dogs can diagnose infectious agents by smelling specimens and, sometimes, the body of an infected individual. We trained six dogs of three different breeds to detect SARS-CoV-2 in respiratory secretions of infected patients and evaluated their performance experimentally, comparing it against the gold standard (rRT-PCR). Here we show that viral detection takes one second per specimen. After scent-interrogating 9,200 samples, our six dogs achieved independently and as a group very high sensitivity, specificity, predictive values, accuracy, and likelihood ratio, with very narrow confidence intervals. The highest metric was the negative predictive value, indicating that with a disease prevalence of 7.6%, 99.9% of the specimens indicated as negative by the dogs did not carry the virus. These findings demonstrate that dogs could be useful to track viral infection in humans, allowing COVID-19 free people to return to work safely.