On some level, Carol Glaser thought, the idea was almost too obvious not to work. For decades, localities and governments around the world had employed dogs to sniff for illicit drugs, explosives, landmines, and missing people–even for disease. Why not COVID?
After all, with as many as 300 million olfactory receptors, a dog’s ability to scent or smell something “is about a hundred thousand times what ours is,” Glaser told me recently. “There’s an analogy I’ve seen: You could take a teaspoon of something and put it in a body of water the size of 20 Olympic swimming pools, and a dog could detect it.”
