It's hard to imagine a cheaper test than this! I'm not sure I like the sociological conditioning or normalization that would happen with large-scale dog "testing" rollouts through society. But I can't deny that something like this would allow a lot of life to go back to normal and that would be a very good thing.
If you need to screen thousands of people per day as they're say, all going to the grocery store, or the office, or whatever, it doesn't take too many days of several thousand "tests" per day times say $1 per test to come up with $10k or $20k.
If a well trained dog that can do the test is $100k then yes you're starting to talk about an equivalently priced test to those already in the marketplace.
Covid tests require a significant amount of human and machine time such that they cost tens of dollars right now. I suspect that dogs could bring that down by an order of magnitude or more.
Such a do should cost you about USD$ 10k, possibly more for a Corona detection dog since it has to be trained in a dangerous environment. You need a dog handler. The dog is not able to work 8h a day and sniff out samples non-stop. Honestly I don't know how many hours a day the dog could perform. 3 hours may be realistic. So how many people can the dog smell in an hour? 60?
Taking into account he costs (dogs, transport, dog handler etc.) it does not seem to be a cost effective solution. Yes, fogs were used to detect pregnancies but we don't do this anymore.
Yes, the paper makes clear that the risk of dogs contracting the virus is a major problem to solve - especially since a symptom may be loss of smell! No reports yet of dogs spreading covid though.
This seems like a much more useful screening method than taking people’s forehead temperature at the door. Plus, you can have a dog wander around performing constant passive screening.
6% seems amazing if you can enable mass screenings at, for example, schools.
As for consequences, you’d presumably be isolated until a secondary test could confirm the results. That’s better than a 14 day quarantine for everyone coming into a region, as many places are “requiring” in the US.
First positive case at a school is gonna have a lot of people sent home.
Our school it was.
The entire classroom
The teacher
All secondary teachers / aids that kid interacted with. Possibly the kids the secondary personal interacted with.
After 14 days everyone allowed back.
Repeat each time a kid gets sick.
So with high false positives, everyone would be in quarantine perpetually.
General opinion was school would open, then very quickly get shut down.
Finally school just went 100% virtual. Except teachers have to come in and teach virtual lessons. Oh and they have to wear a mask while teaching lessons to the virtual audience. This is for kindergarten. So parents will have to be with kid 100% of the time or it’s all a waste.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 43.4 ms ] threadROTFL. Do you know what a working dog costs? Good luck with that. But you could try to build an artificial nose based on the headspace.
If you need to screen thousands of people per day as they're say, all going to the grocery store, or the office, or whatever, it doesn't take too many days of several thousand "tests" per day times say $1 per test to come up with $10k or $20k.
If a well trained dog that can do the test is $100k then yes you're starting to talk about an equivalently priced test to those already in the marketplace.
Covid tests require a significant amount of human and machine time such that they cost tens of dollars right now. I suspect that dogs could bring that down by an order of magnitude or more.
Taking into account he costs (dogs, transport, dog handler etc.) it does not seem to be a cost effective solution. Yes, fogs were used to detect pregnancies but we don't do this anymore.
But when your talking about a test being performed on thousands, potentially tens of thousands people per day, you would recoup the cost in no time.
1) Dog positive -> straight to full quarantine
2) Dog negative -> self-isolate until pathology tests come back
3) Pathology positive -> back to quarantine
4) Pathology negative -> free to run in the world
As for consequences, you’d presumably be isolated until a secondary test could confirm the results. That’s better than a 14 day quarantine for everyone coming into a region, as many places are “requiring” in the US.
Our school it was. The entire classroom The teacher All secondary teachers / aids that kid interacted with. Possibly the kids the secondary personal interacted with. After 14 days everyone allowed back. Repeat each time a kid gets sick.
So with high false positives, everyone would be in quarantine perpetually.
General opinion was school would open, then very quickly get shut down.
Finally school just went 100% virtual. Except teachers have to come in and teach virtual lessons. Oh and they have to wear a mask while teaching lessons to the virtual audience. This is for kindergarten. So parents will have to be with kid 100% of the time or it’s all a waste.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23542335