Forget air purifiers and lateral flow tests – schools in America have been pioneering the use of man’s best friend to battle through the Covid crisis, The Independent reports.
Two police dogs have been trained to detect Covid and will go to work in the Freetown, Lakeville and Norton school districts in Massachusetts.
Huntah and Duke, both one-year-old Labradors, will sit down to alert staff when they pick up the scent of Covid so that the area can be cleaned.
“With Covid whether it’s the Omicron, whether it’s the Delta, our dogs will hit on it,” said Bristol County Captain Paul Douglas, “We’ll go right into the classroom if the students are in there, and our dogs actually work right through it.
“They just walk right through, they go over the backpacks, around the teachers.”
The detection programme was developed by Florida International University’s International Forensic Research Institute, which says that the dogs are 99 per cent accurate in detecting the virus.