The Director-General of the Rwanda Biomedical Center (RBC) Dr. Sabin Nsanzimana and The Ambassador of Germany in Rwanda, Dr. Thomas Kurz on Monday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that will kick start use of Sniffer dogs in tracking Covid-19 cases.
The project dubbed “Scent Identification of COVID-19 using dogs”
to detect people infected with virus comes at a time when the government has
embarked on public screening.
Similar sniffer dog projects, introduced mid this year, have
already used at the airports of Helsinki, Dubai, Lebanon and Finland, and the
dogs have a detection rate of 94%.
“So excited about this new Rwanda-Germany project with RBC.
(This is) yet another great joint project…so glad we are in this together
fighting Covid-19,” the Germany embassy said on twitter.
“This project will accelerate our testing capabilities especially in public places where mass testing will be needed,” Dr. Sabin Nsanzimana told reporters.
Nsanzimana also revealed that the exercise will start next month (December 2020) and the country will need as many sniffer dogs as it can possibly handle in this new project.
The sniffer dogs will add to Rwanda’s package of measures to use technology and all available resources to prevent more Covid-19 infections in public places as government moves to open more business operations and travel in and out of the country.
Rwanda has installed a series of robots at the Kigali International Airport (KIA) in an effort to minimize the risk of medical staff catching coronavirus but also increasing trust of safety among international travelers who touch and leave Rwanda soil since August.
As of November 22, 2020, Rwanda had recorded 5,665 cases of Covid-19 infections, and 47 deaths but equally registering a good number of recoveries (5,164) and over 607,000 tests.
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