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called 'dogs' aren't they? :confused:

I don't get why covid sniffer dogs are not in common use by now, beyond the fact that it takes a few weeks to train them, because they started trials early last year, with good results.

This one is from earlier this year -

 
I know - seems fucking mad. The dogs in that picture look like labs and retrievers and it doesn't say what breeds can do it but they all have amazing sense of smell and there's no shortage of alsations and other dogs needing rehoming at the moment. I thought I'd read that one of the Scandinavian countries were using them last summer.
 
The UK only carries out going on for a million tests a day. It would be no probs getting hold of tens of thousands of specially trained sniffer dogs and building vast sniffer dog facilities. Madness that this hasn't happened.
 
I don't get why covid sniffer dogs are not in common use by now, beyond the fact that it takes a few weeks to train them, because they started trials early last year, with good results.

This one is from earlier this year -

It's like the Israelis in World War Z.
 
I don't get why covid sniffer dogs are not in common use by now, beyond the fact that it takes a few weeks to train them, because they started trials early last year, with good results.

This one is from earlier this year -


Based on the figures in that article, it seems a dog has an 800x false positive rate compared to a lateral flow test. If they used dogs at all school gates with the aim of keeping COVID-positive children out of schools, 712000 children who didn't have coronavirus would be incorrectly sent home every day.
 
How would you practically use them other than perhaps sampling a crowd for statistical purposes . At airports, train stations? Excuse me sir, Rover here indicates you've got coronavirus... No stand back but go home immediately....
well you could use them to screen people going into crowded halls or yes crowded railway/tube stations.
 
Based on the figures in that article, it seems a dog has an 800x false positive rate compared to a lateral flow test. If they used dogs at all school gates with the aim of keeping COVID-positive children out of schools, 712000 children who didn't have coronavirus would be incorrectly sent home every day.
?

The highest performing dogs in the trial detected the odour of the virus in the samples with up to 94.3% sensitivity (meaning a low risk of false negative results) and up to 92% specificity (meaning a low risk of false positive results). This is a greater accuracy than recommended by the World Health Organization for COVID-19 diagnostics, with the dogs consistently outperforming lateral flow tests across sensitivities between 80-90%, which have an overall sensitivity of between 58-77%.

While PCR is the gold standard of tests, with 97.2% sensitivity and 90% specificity, the researchers emphasise the dogs have the advantage of being incredibly rapid, and non-invasive, with the potential to quickly and passively screen individuals in public places without inconvenience.
 
What happened to the apparent quick paper swab / spit tests a US company was developing. I think they didn't have a very high accuracy rate if looking at individuals but could be helpful in mass testing, e.g. classrooms. The advantage being, they gave results immediately.

Heh. Good luck with that. Apart from the pragmatics. Yeah, I know they have drug sniffer dogs at stations to target searches but...

I'm not the most agro person but if was told to go home because a dog may have caught the wiff of rona on me, I'd not be inclined to obey as I'm probably going somewhere for a non trivial reason to start with. Assuming asymptomatically infected of course. Wouldn't be travelling in the first place otherwise.
 
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Heh. Good luck with that. Apart from the pragmatics. Yeah, I know they have drug sniffer dogs at stations to target searches but...

I'm not the most agro person but if was told to go home because a dog may have caught the wiff of rona on me, I'd not be inclined to obey as I'm probably going somewhere for a non trivial reason to start with. Assuming asymptomatically infected of course. Wouldn't be travelling in the first place otherwise.

Also dogs are intimidating. You'd get more compliance if there were a very quick test, with very high accuracy. That I would follow.
 
Those figures for PCR and LFT accuracy are from cloud cuckoo land.
What are the figures/WHO figures? I'd also imagine the accuracy will have been reduced somewhat, certainly in the South West, by that lab that was churning out false negatives.


Gloucestershire’s COVID-19 case rate is set to rocket because of recent false negative test results from the UKHSA laboratory, the county council has warned today (Oct 21).
 
What are the figures/WHO figures? I'd also imagine the accuracy will have been reduced somewhat, certainly in the South West, by that lab that was churning out false negatives.


I dont think estimates for test accuracy are based on the continual use of all real-world data as it accrues, so I highly doubt the lab fiasco made any difference to official estimates.
 
Also dogs are intimidating. You'd get more compliance if there were a very quick test, with very high accuracy. That I would follow.
They could use fluffy non-aggressive spaniel types, and if compliance was a problem they could have fuck-off huge alsations in reserve to set on people who didn't comply :thumbs::

This was the article I read from last year 'Close to 100% accuracy': Helsinki airport uses sniffer dogs to detect Covid

and from May this year


Doesn't seem such a ludicrous proposal to me. I'd be happy to trust a dog - particularly with the false LFT readings you keep hearing about.
 
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Based on the figures in that article, it seems a dog has an 800x false positive rate compared to a lateral flow test. If they used dogs at all school gates with the aim of keeping COVID-positive children out of schools, 712000 children who didn't have coronavirus would be incorrectly sent home every day.

I am confused, the article says there's a low risk of false positives.

The highest performing dogs in the trial detected the odour of the virus in the samples with up to 94.3% sensitivity (meaning a low risk of false negative results) and up to 92% specificity (meaning a low risk of false positive results). This is a greater accuracy than recommended by the World Health Organization for COVID-19 diagnostics, with the dogs consistently outperforming lateral flow tests across sensitivities between 80-90%, which have an overall sensitivity of between 58-77%.
 
This discussion will come down to which studies figures, or amalgamated figures, for lateral flow tests platinumsage prefers. Different attempts to study this have yielded different results. Whether the testing is supervised made quite a difference to early uk estimates for a start.

Here is one example of an article that somewhat looks into this, but I expect its not the best one. If platinumsage tells us which source they favour, I'll look intot he detail.

 
I tmight be a useful tool in the arsenal but as usual it will come down to how much it can scale up - in this case supply of not just suitably trained dogs but also the people to handle them.

Some measures also end up adding value because they act as deterrents and changers of behaviour, eg make people think about whether their choice of venue is actually safe and whether its worth the hassle.
 
True, mind you Johnson would likely hand it over to Athos who'd invest in a huge programme of rearing specially trained puppies who'd be ready by 2027.
 
Guess this belongs in world news but could go in any of the loon threads.

French women buys fake vaccination certificate, gets sick, is treated by the hospital as though she has antibodies from the vaccine, doesn’t end well.


auto-translated extracts:

This woman was admitted to hospital in early December for Covid-19 infection. Her state of health quickly challenged the medical teams: "This was the first time we had confronted a young person, with no known medical history, a priori vaccinated, and who was developing a form of remarkable severity in its severity," explains Professor Djilali Annane.

The intensive care unit teams then carry out numerous tests to detect a possible disease unknown to the victim, without success. On the other hand, it is by testing antibodies that the mystery is solved: the woman had presented a fake vaccination certificate. Unfortunately, it was too late to change her treatment and the fifty-year-old died shortly after. "We are never angry with her patients but when we were revealed that she had not been vaccinated, we better understood the progress of her clinical history."

According to Professor Djilali Annane, if the medical teams had immediately been aware of this lack of vaccination, the story could have been different, with better adapted therapeutic management. "If we had the information before it was placed under ventilation, we could have treated it with neutralizing antibodies, something we obviously had not thought of, because it was vaccinated for us. We cannot guarantee 100% that this would have changed the course of its history, but we know that these treatments reduce the risk of making serious forms "

Djilali Annane expresses her anger towards those who drew up the false certificate: "To all my colleagues, really: especially no false certificates! It's not a service to the people who demand them. False certificates not only do not protect against the virus, but they make people lose opportunities. When a false certificate is issued, the person is deceived."
 
If they are going to take neutralising antibodies into account when deciding on treatments then they should really try to measure those in the patient rather than make assumptions. Because even if she'd really been vaccinated we shouldnt make assumptions about the results that will have on individuals immune responses over time.
 
If they are going to take neutralising antibodies into account when deciding on treatments then they should really try to measure those in the patient rather than make assumptions. Because even if she'd really been vaccinated we shouldnt make assumptions about the results that will have on individuals immune responses over time.
If your healthcare resources are greatly stretched (or under-resourced) then you are clearly going to lean towards leveraging patient medical "history" in order to both expedite their care and free up time/resources for other cases, rather than evaluating everything from scratch. NAbs testing is highly specialised, usually time consuming and expensive (compared to binding), and, as you say, one doesn't necessarily always follow from the other (insert warnings about people making assumptions from diagnostic binding antibody tests, correlates of protection, etc).

Perhaps a cautionary tale worth publicising to the hard-of-thinking anti-vax control cohort.
 
Yeah. Let me consider it a slightly different way then, they could have assumed the vaccine wasnt working well for the patient and consider going for more aggressive treatment sooner. I only say that because I expect there will be otherwise-healthy 50 year olds who dont end up being protected by genuine vaccination, and I dont have a problem with this particular case being used to draw attention to the dangers of faking vaccination status.

edited to say - I somewhat regret these posts because I dont want to be an armchair doctor or criticise medical care under difficult circumstances. These angles just leapt into my brain based on the way the story was written and my dislike of assumptions, and using a certain form of logic. And I think I get too stressed at this stage of new pandemic waves emerging, and it affects my posts at times.
 
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