Helsinki Airport uses an unusual method to track down people who could be infected with the coronavirus. Specially trained dogs now support the officers in their search. The animals even have a remarkable reference: the University of Helsinki found in extensive tests that the hit rate of the four-legged friends is almost 100 percent.
Since dogs have an extremely fine sense of judgment and are considered extremely sensitive animals, humans have been making use of these skills for a very long time. For example, the four-legged friends are indispensable partners when finding drugs, people buried or in the area of close-range searches.
Helsinki Airport writes in a notice that dogs only need around 10 to 100 molecules to identify and display the virus. The test devices, on the other hand, would require at least 18 million molecules. For the time being, ten dogs were trained to be "corona investigators". The tests at the University of Helsinki have shown that the animals can detect the virus even if the person concerned shows no symptoms at all.
Anyone who speculates on meeting the curious dogs or, conversely, might even be afraid of the animals, has to put up with the fact that at Helsinki Airport only a cloth is wiped over the skin of the passengers. The dogs then sniff at this and, depending on the reaction of the animals, a PCR test can then be initiated.
In any case, the Finnish airport sees itself as a pioneer in the field of "Corona sniffing", because so far no other airport in the world has used dogs on a large scale as "investigators". So it remains to be seen whether the canine method will work in Helsinki. However, it is very likely that this is more reliable than the temperature measurements practiced at many airports.
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