COVID-19 is the primary reason why 2020 has been a disastrous year. Not only is this disease fatal for many, but it’s also not easy to detect it. Those who are infected take weeks before developing any symptoms, and this just makes it close to impossible to find out whether or not a person has the virus or not.
But luckily for us, we have the best virus-detecting machines right beside us, and they have been around for thousands of years. Yes, we’re referring to our fluffy doggos. We all know about their acute senses of smell and how it’s being used to detect hidden items or substances.
The coronavirus does belong to this category somehow, as it is definitely hidden from most people unless a test is done. The United Kingdom pioneered the training of dogs to detect the coronavirus and many countries followed suit. One of them is Finland, and now, their program can be argued as the most advanced in the world.
They have so much faith in their sniffing dogs’ capabilities that they have deployed the in Helsinki airport to screen arriving passengers. Helsinki is Finland’s capital, so it’s a given that most international flights land here, making the risk in this airport sky-high.
But because of these sniffing dogs, that risk is being trimmed down to almost zero. Dr. Anna Hielm-Bjorkman from the University of Helsinki claims that their service pups are even more accurate than the standard COVID-19 test. On top of this, the test is quicker and a whole lot cheaper.
Arriving passengers will have to wipe their bodies with tissue paper after baggage claim. The dogs will then screen these, and they will paw at samples that have the virus. But since this project is still in the trial phase, the standard test will still be done even if the passenger’s tissue sample returns a negative result. Dr. Bjorkman believes that this will be the standard in airports in the coming year.
Credits: CNBC Television
