Less than 400 corona cases in city

Less than 400 cases were reported in the city for the second consecutive day, with 375 new infections and three Covid-19 fatalities on Tuesday, bringing the total count to 3,12,468, with 11,396 deaths so far.

Meanwhile, the recovery rate is at a healthy 94 per cent, with 415 patients having recovered in the last 24 hours, pushing the tally of those recovered to 2,95,045.

In the rest of Maharashtra, there were 2,515 new cases and 35 Covid-19 deaths on Tuesday, taking the total count to 20,48,802, with 51,360 fatalities till now.

Indian Army has trained canines to detect Covid-19 virus for a quick and a real time situation for easier movements of troops. These canines — ‘Chippiparai’ and ‘Cocker Spaniel’ — have been deployed at transit camps of the force in Delhi and Chandigarh.

The Cocker Spaniel is twoyears-old and is named Casper, and Chippiparai is one-year-old and is named Jaya.

Till date, 22 samples have been found positive by the Covid-19 detection dogs after screening around 3,806 troops at both the places.

Explaining how all it started, Lieutenant Colonel Surinder Saini, Instructor at Remount Veterinary Corps based in Meerut, said that Indian Army undertook trials for detection of Covid-19 using the army dogs in controlled conditions after seeing the global trend of using medical detection dogs for various diseases like cancer, malaria, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and others.

There after a concerted effort was made to train an indigenous breed of dog ‘Chippiparai’ and a ‘Cocker Spaniel’ to detect the volatilome of Covid-19 disease from urine and sweat samples of positive cases by comparative method.

“Positive and suspected samples were obtained from the Military Hospital, Meerut Cantt and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Subharti Medical College, Meerut for the purpose of training,” Lieutenant Colonel Surinder Saini said.

These two dogs were successfully trained on specific biomarkers emanating from urine and sweat samples of positive patients.

Scientifically, it is evident that affected body tissues release unique volatile metabolic biomarkers which are used as disease signatures for detection of disease by the medical detection dogs.

The sensitivity and specificity of both the dogs obtained from screening of 279 urine and 267 sweat samples during the initial trial procedure was found to be very high.