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Manila Bulletin devider Entertainment devider Howie Severino's docu 'COVID K9' airs this Saturday on I-Witness

Howie Severino's docu 'COVID K9' airs this Saturday on I-Witness

Published Mar 19, 2021 11:23 pm

After a year of the pandemic, much of the world is emerging from its common dystopia. Not the Philippines. Cases are spiking, lockdowns and curfews are back. Vaccines are delayed.

Howie Severino, among the country’s early COVID-19 cases, looks back on this unimaginable year, and dwells on one of the most common symptoms that he and now millions of other COVID-19 survivors have endured: the loss of smell.

It’s an experience unique to COVID-19. Survivors like Howie realize how incomplete the world is once the sense of smell is taken away, and what a blessing it was to get it back.

His team’s research on smell leads them to a solution that can detect even asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers: dogs.

Gifted with olfactory superpowers, dogs have been trained to sniff out drugs and explosives. In airports in some countries, they are already being used to identify people who could be infected with the virus. Howie and his team found a wooded hillside in Antipolo where professional working dogs are being trained to do the same.

As COVID-19 surges anew, can dogs help us buy time while waiting for overdue vaccines?

Watch Howie Severino’s documentary, “COVID K9,” this Saturday on I-Witness, 10:15 p.m. on GMA.

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