The Omicron COVID-19 variant can survive longer than previous strains of the virus on plastic surfaces and human skin, new research by Japanese scientists has found.
Omicron’s high “environmental stability” helped it replace Delta
The study was conducted by a team from the Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, which has not yet been peer-reviewed. He found that the variants survived much longer than the original strain after a series of laboratory tests.
They concluded that omicron’s high “environmental stability” as well as its ability to remain infectious could have helped it replace Delta as the dominant variant and spread more rapidly.
On plastic surfaces, the median survival times for the parent strain and the Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta variants were 56 hours, 191.3 hours, 156.6 hours, 59.3 hours, and 114 hours, respectively.
That compared to 193.5 hours, the equivalent of eight days, for Omicron, the researchers reported on bioRxiv before the peer review.
Plastic and leather surfaces: Ómicron lasts more than 21
In cadaveric skin samples, the median virus survival time was 8.6 hours for the original version, 19.6 hours for Alpha, 19.1 hours for Beta, 11 hours for Gamma, 16.8 hours for Delta and 21.1 hours for Omicron.
Ómicron remains a major concern around the world and is now present in all EU countries. And it has become the dominant variant in most member states, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
The countries with the highest percentage of new cases attributed to Omicron by sequencing were Finland (99.9%), Belgium (99.7%), Malta (99.3%) and Denmark (98.8%).
Although the variants were generally more resistant to ethanol than the original strain of COVID-19. All were completely inactivated on the skin after 15 seconds of exposure to alcohol-based hand sanitizers.
“Therefore,” the researchers concluded, “it is strongly recommended that current infection control practices (hand hygiene) use disinfectants… as proposed by the World Health Organization [OMS]”.
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