The pandemic may still be an ongoing event, but gradual progress has been made, giving many people hope that the pandemic will end in the near future. As vaccination distribution continues, cases drop, and an increasing number of businesses continue to open under less restrictive requirements. It is clear to many that at the moment, life seems to be slowly returning to the way it used to be. One relatively recent progress that has been made in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19 is that some dogs have successfully been trained to detect people with the virus.

Humans use dogs to detect many things, so when the pandemic started, people began training dogs to detect COVID-19. According to Yahoo News, countries including Finland, Germany, France, and the United Arab Emirates have started using dogs for COVID-19 testing, but it was not widely accepted. Now that more places have successfully trained dogs that can detect COVID-19, people have begun using these dogs for a variety of different purposes around the world.

According to Cronkite News, police officers in Sonora, Mexico, have trained nine of their dogs to successfully detect COVID-19 cases. At the moment, these dogs work at some of the mass testing centers for asymptomatic people in Mexico. This is because, as of now, proper testing can only be given to symptomatic people, so the dogs are used as a cheap and efficient alternative.

Not only have dogs been used by police to detect possible positive cases, but they have also been used by NASCAR. According to the Charlotte Observer, NASCAR first began looking into the possibility of using dogs to sniff out people with COVID-19 at the beginning of last year. Since then, they turned their idea into a reality. They have begun using their dogs to detect people with COVID-19 at races in Atlanta since they are relatively fast and have an accuracy that is believed to be around ninety-eight percent.

People have only just begun exploring the possibilities of using dogs as a new method of detecting COVID-19. In the future, it is likely that more of these dogs will be found in large public spaces such as international airports, large sporting events, and many more. According to Analise Hopper (10), “Dogs will be super useful in the future of COVID-19 testing because they are efficient and have good accuracy.” Even though good progress is being made in the effort to slow the spread of COVID-19, having dogs as an option of combating the spread is only another way for people to make progress in returning the world back to normal.