What does a pandemic smell like?

 

Apparently Covid-19 has a particular odour and sniffer dogs are being worked with in a number of trials around the world, showing huge early promise in sniffing out people with the virus.

 

Germany is just one of the countries trialling sniffer dogs, the idea being dogs can be trained to pick up Covid infections before symptoms even appear.

 

In France, detector dogs are being trained using sweat samples from infected patients.  

 

Most of the dogs can detect a positive case from a line of negative ones with 100 per cent accuracy.

 

Coronavirus sniffer dogs are also being trained in the UK,  the United Arab Emirates, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Belgium.