The next step in NASCAR's COVID-19 detection protocols comes with four paws and a tail.
Two highly trained dogs will greet roughly 1,000 crew members, officials, and essential racing personnel at Atlanta Motor Speedway ahead of this Sunday's Cup race to determine whether they have the virus prior to entering the track's garage area. It's a method of virus detection NASCAR is testing out just after the sport passes the one-year mark of its pandemic shutdown.
"It is a matter primarily of speed," NASCAR managing director of racing operations Tom Bryant told The Charlotte Observer. "When you combine the speed of the dog with the accuracy level that they're seeing from the dogs, we've not found a test yet that gives you that high a degree of confidence that it's correct in that short amount of time."
According to Bryant, it will take the dog 20 seconds to sniff an individual and detect COVID-19. If the virus is detected, the dog will sit down, and that individual will report to the AMR/NASCAR safety team for follow up screening to determine their status for the race.
NASCAR is not regularly testing its teams or individuals in its garage "footprint" before races. Instead, a screening questionnaire, which relies on self-reported symptoms and exposures, is the sport's first line of defense. Temperatures are also checked at the track and rapid tests are available for the safety team physicians to utilize at their discretion after reported symptoms. The process for those tests takes approximately 15 to 20 minutes to complete, according to Bryant.
Ryan Stanton, the medical director of the AMR/NASCAR safety team, told The Observer last week that NASCAR's decision to forego rapid testing was rooted in concerns over developing technology and missing a "false negative" rather than a "false positive," although this method could miss asymptomatic cases. The dogs provide a solution to that.
According to the 360 K9 Group, the canine company working with NASCAR for the screening, their dogs can detect the COVID-19 virus on someone with an accuracy rate of 98%, and in some cases very early in the infection cycle, before molecular tests show a positive infection.
"That's obviously a very high rate of accuracy and it gives you a high degree of confidence that once the dog has cleared someone, at least in that moment they're COVID-free," Bryant said.
Coronavirus-sniffing dogs have been used to screen guests entering the arena for Miami Heat games this season, as well as passengers at international airports. Only individuals in the garage footprint, which does not include Cup drivers or fans, will undergo this type of screening, but Bryant said it could expand to other areas of the track or other events moving forward.
NASCAR started exploring the possibility of this canine detection method at the end of last year, according to Bryant, but the proximity of this weekend's race in Hampton, Ga., to the 360 K9 Group's training facility in Anniston, Ala., made this weekend's race the opportune time for a test run at the track.
"This is still relatively new, definitely new to us, so we're going into this limited proof of concept on Sunday to see how it works," Bryant said, adding that he didn't want to speculate about future implementation until a first run at the track. " ... I do think there's a likelihood we'll use them again, but really we're gonna have this first test and see what we learn and go from there."
While it's a method new to NASCAR, the 360 K9 Group noted that it is not a new operator in the bio-detection industry. The company has worked closely with the USDA since 2011 to train its dog teams to locate trees infected with a citrus canker, as well as infections in other types of plants and fruits with 96% to 99% accuracy. When COVID-19 hit the U.S. last year, the company said it began focusing on isolating a proprietary training aid that allows the dogs to focus on identifying the virus rather than the byproduct of the infection through scent. The result, however, is the same: The dogs can detect disease.
"We've had several conversations with their scientists and looked at how they're arriving at those rates and it does appear that the dogs are comparable to molecular tests, a PCR-type test, in terms of detecting active virus in a person," Bryant said.
For NASCAR, the efficiency of the dog's ability to detect the virus makes it a particularly attractive screening method. Staggered screening for crews begins at 8 a.m. Sunday for a 3 p.m. race. With two dog teams, which include two dogs and their handlers, the total time of their portion of the screening process should take around three hours for 1,000 individuals, including breaks.
"For a large field operation like we have week-to-week, that potentially is a great solution for us to have a high degree of confidence that those folks are COVID-free and really increased the protection of the garage," Bryant said. "So those two factors together make it potentially a really good option."
