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Sit back, remain, COVID detection! Dogs from Chile report for duty at Santiago Airport

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - At Chile's Santiago International Airport, the task of sniffing out passengers contaminated with COVID-19 falls to the dogs.

When they smell the infection, a team of Golden Retrievers and Labradors sit down to get a treat. The canines wear green jackets "biodetector" with a red cross.

Passengers clean their necks and wrists at an airport health checkpoint with gauze pads that are then placed in glass containers and sent to the dogs to see if they detect COVID-19.

Sniffer dogs are best known for detecting drugs and bombs, but they have also been trained to detect malaria, cancer and Parkinson's disease beforehand.

In the United Arab Emirates and Finland, dogs qualified to detect the novel coronavirus have already begun sniffing passenger samples at airports.

A research recently discovered dogs with 85 percent to 100 percent accuracy can identify infected individuals and rule out infection with 92 percent to 99 percent accuracy.

The dogs were trained by Chile's Carabinero police and Inspector General Esteban Diaz said dogs had more than 3 million olfactory receptors, more than 50 times that of humans, so they were ideally placed to help combat the coronavirus.

Infections in Chile are well down from a high in June, but according to a Reuters count, they have started increasing again with around 2,000 new cases registered on average every day. Chile has 589,189 confirmed cases in total and 16,217 deaths due to the disease. (Graphic: 34pvUyi/ tmsnrt.rs)

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