Two dogs were successfully trained to sniff out COVID-19 after practicing on more than 3,000 samples, the Austrian army announced on Tuesday.
The two dogs, a Belgian Shepherd and a Rottweiler, were trained with various samples, including used face masks. Their success rate was "far above 80 percent," said Austria's Defense Minister Klaudia Tanner.
"We have long known that our service dogs can sniff out various materials ... But what we have achieved here is something very special," she told a news conference.
Several similar trials have been carried out around the world, from Thailand to Britain, taking advantage of dogs' powerful sense of smell.
These trials suggest dogs could be regularly deployed as an extra safety check at border entry points and large events.
An airport in Finland has been deploying dogs to help trace carriers of COVID-19 since last year.
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Otto Koppitsch, the head of the Austrian army's dog-training center, said that for a dog with previous sniffer experience, it takes around two weeks to be able to tell which samples contain COVID-19 and an extra three months for that dog to be fully trained to detect the coronavirus.
So far, it's not clear exactly how the sniffer dogs will be used, but the officials said they could help other countries to train their canines.