By Lisa Cohn

We’ve written about a superpower dog or three before: dogs can identify when a diabetic person’s blood sugar is dropping, and alert them to the need to act. They can sense when autistic kids are getting upset, and exert pressure on their legs or arms to help calm them. Dogs’ superpowers often come from their keen sense of smell. They can even smell certain types of cancer.

Our dog, Hudson, can find a ball lost in the woods simply by following his nose.

Now comes a new type of superpower dog: one who can sniff out COVID, helping schools and other organizations identify whether people are infected with the virus. In fact, a dog’s nose can be more accurate than a PCR test, according to an article in Smithsonian Magazine.

Dogs trained to sniff out Covid identified Covid cases in 335 people at 97% accuracy just by smelling human sweat, said the article.

“The study, led by Dominique Grandjean at the Alfort School of Veterinary Medicine in suburban Paris, was published in PLOS One. It suggests that with the proper scent work, canines could help obtain test results fast in mass screening efforts and reduce the need for invasive nasal swab tests,” said the article.

Researchers have also found that dogs can identify cases with no symptoms 48 hours before people test positive in a PCR test, said the Smithsonian piece. The dogs who participated in the study were from French fire departments and the Ministry of Interior of the United Arab Emirates. When the pups identified the virus correctly in sweat samples, they were rewarded with toys. The dogs in the study had undergone scent training in the past.

For the study, the researchers used dogs from French fire departments and the Ministry of the Interior of the United Arab Emirates. Each pup was rewarded with toys like tennis balls if they picked out the virus successfully in sweat samples.

“If a dog sniffed a sample it thought was positive for Covid-19, it would sit down in front of it. It took about 15 seconds for the dogs to sift through 10 sweat samples from 10 different individuals that neither the dogs nor human handlers had interacted with before. Aside from detecting the virus, the dogs were also asked to find negative samples and identified the Covid-free samples with 91 percent accuracy,” said the Smithsonian article.

The dog-sniffing research isn’t only taking place outside the U.S. At an elementary school in Massachusetts, a dog named Huntah identifies COVID by smelling kids’ backpacks. This helps prevent the spread of Covid and helps kids stay in school. Listen to the podcast here.

In our next book, Bash and Lucy say, “Love Like a Dog,” Lucy, a golden retriever, has a special superpower that helps solve the mystery of the missing library books. We can’t give it away, so stay tuned, and be sure to thank your dogs for whatever superpowers they bring to your household!

P.S. Be sure to watch puppy Hudson frolic with Michael, age 5, in our first book trailer: