Abstract
In January 2020, the coronavirus disease was declared, by the World Health Organization as a global public health emergency. Recommendations from the WHO COVID Emergency Committee continue to support strengthening COVID surveillance systems, including timely access to effective diagnostics. Questions were raised about the validity of considering the RT-PCR as the gold standard in COVID-19 diagnosis. It has been suggested that a variety of methods should be used to evaluate advocated tests. Dogs had been successfully trained and employed to detect diseases in humans. Here we show that upon training explosives detection dogs on sniffing COVID-19 odor in patients’ sweat, those dogs were able to successfully screen out 3249 individuals who tested negative for the SARS-CoV-2, from a cohort of 3290 individuals. Additionally, using Bayesian analysis, the sensitivity of the K9 test was found to be superior to the RT-PCR test performed on nasal swabs from a cohort of 3134 persons. Given its high sensitivity, short turn-around-time, low cost, less invasiveness, and ease of application, the detection dogs test lends itself as a better alternative to the RT-PCR in screening for SARS-CoV-2 in asymptomatic individuals.
Highlights
In January 2020, the coronavirus disease was declared, by the World Health Organization as a global public health emergency
The chemical basis for such precise and sophisticated olfactory sense is the presence of volatile organic compounds (VOC) that represent a large range of stable chemical compounds, volatile at room temperature, and are detectable in body secretions
Current available evidence suggests that the specificity of the test is moderate (63–78%). It means that a positive test is highly suggestive of true COVID-19, but a negative test does not rule out the disease[15]
Summary
In January 2020, the coronavirus disease was declared, by the World Health Organization as a global public health emergency. We show that upon training explosives detection dogs on sniffing COVID-19 odor in patients’ sweat, those dogs were able to successfully screen out 3249 individuals who tested negative for the SARS-CoV-2, from a cohort of 3290 individuals. Feces and blood had the poorest rates and no virus was detected in urine samples[12,13] These tests vary in sensitivity and specificity. Tests for COVID-19 are judged almost exclusively on their sensitivity or how well they can detect viral proteins or RNA molecules in a specimen. This measure ignores the context in which the test is used. High-frequency testing using a low analytic sensitivity test would be superior in filtering COVID-19 cases than low-frequency testing with a high analytic sensitivity test[17]
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