Israel Dog Unit
Israel Dog UnitPhoto credits to SNIFF

The Israel Dog Unit (IDU) has appealed to Prime Minister Netanyahu and the ministers directly involved in the fight against the coronavirus to conduct an Israeli pilot program for the use of professional sniffer dogs to identify coronavirus patients before they enter the country, at border checkpoints, airports and land crossings.

A similar program conducted by the US showed a 90% success rate. Each test took only five seconds.

The Israel Dog Unit is made up of professional volunteers and dogs who have taken part in locating and identifying missing persons for many years.

"The IDU turned to various factors in the early days of the virus in Israel in order to offer to do the pilot in Israel," the organization said in a statement, "Now that our partners abroad are proving that it works and successful in identifying coronavirus patients with 'corona dogs' who have been trained for this, this is the time, without delay, to allow us to bring these dogs to Israel to help in the national effort to cut off the chain of infection of this deadly virus."

The IDU also noted that "in recent months, various pilots have been conducted abroad to identify the coronavirus by using professional sniffer dogs. Our method is a unique method that has already been applied in the field with impressive success. Those dogs have been trained to identify the person carrying the virus. Those dogs were trained to identify the person carrying the virus - and to warn about it. As mentioned, our partner in the US is already working with corona dogs in a quick check to verify the coronavirus in stadiums and they are in talks to deploy this successful program at airports as well. It works. It takes 5.2 seconds to test and get the result, so far with more than 90% success and accuracy."

"We and our partner abroad hold a unique and innovative patent that makes us the only ones in the world with the unique method and scents for a thousand "corona dogs" and can apply a test directly to a patient who carries the smell in his body. In recent days, a number of IDU dogs have landed abroad to be reconciled with our trainers and scientists abroad in the hope of getting approval from the Israeli authorities to bring with them "operational" corona dogs and training equipment when they return to Israel as soon as possible, and to copy the success in Israel."

"Now, we must import special dogs that have already been trained to detect the coronavirus and allow us to import training equipment to train more corona dogs within Israel. To this end, we turn and ask for help in creating a special pilot that aims to place the dogs at the borders of the country and at Israeli airports so that they can strengthen the identification of asymptomatic coronavirus patients entering Israel or checkpoints and entering at large gatherings and thus help us keep Israel safe from the mutations of the virus," the organization stated.