According to a study conducted by Japanese researchers, the Omicron variant of COVID-19 can survive longer on skin and plastic than earlier variants such as Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Gamma.
According to the study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed and was recently published on the preprint repository BioRxiv, Omicron can survive on the skin for more than 21 hours and on any plastic surface for more than eight days.
As a result, it is possible that Omicron spreads faster than other strains, according to the study. These VOCs' high environmental stability may increase the risk of contact transmission and contribute to their spread.
According to the findings of this study, Omicron has the highest environmental stability among VOCs, which could be one of the factors that allowed the variant to replace the Delta variant and spread rapidly.
According to the study, the Omicron variant can survive for up to 193.5 hours on plastic surfaces and 21.1 hours on skin.
In comparison, the original strain and later variants such as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta survived for 56, 191.3, 156.6, 59.3 hours, and 114 hours, respectively.
On the skin, the average virus survival times were 8.6 hours for the original version, 19.1 hours for Beta, 19.6 hours for Alpha, 11 hours for Gamma, and 16.8 hours for Delta Variant, according to the researchers.
As a result, it is strongly advised that current infection control (hand hygiene) practises employ disinfectants... as recommended by the World health Organization.
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