The IDF's Intelligence Directorate has addressed a number of international studies that looked into dogs' ability to identify the presence of coronavirus in humans. A report from the Corona National Knowledge and Information Center, a joint venture between the IDF and the Health Ministry, states that studies "have raised the possibility of using dogs trained to identify corona patients based on samples of their saliva, sweat, or urine."
The report says that "the studies appear to show that dogs have a strong ability to identify COVID patients based on the patients' bodies' reactions to the presence of the virus, but not the virus itself."
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According to the report, the studies on using dogs to sniff identify COVID patients are in early stages, and "we need to wait until the results of additional studies are published" before arriving at conclusions about dogs' precise abilities to discover the presence of the virus in humans.
"If indeed dogs are proven to have the ability, we can expect them to become widely used in sweeping crowded areas," the IDF report said.
However, it stressed that dogs could not replace tests and, if used, would help locate people at risk of spreading the virus and who might not have been tested.
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