Omicron is not only more contagious, but survives longer on plastic surfaces and skin than older variants of COVID, according to new research cited by News.
A team from Kyoto Regional Medical University in Japan said they found that the newest coronavirus variant survived much longer than the original strain discovered in Wuhan, China at the start of the pandemic.
After a series of laboratory tests on plastic surfaces, the team announced that the survival times of the original 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. But the survival time of the Omicron variant on plastic surfaces was 193.5 hours, i.e. about eight days.
In parallel, analyzes of skin samples showed that the virus survived for 8.6 hours for the original variant, 19.6 hours for the Alpha, 19.1 hours for the Beta, 11 hours for the Gamma, 16.8 hours for the Delta. and 21.1 hours for Omicron. The authors wrote in their study: “Our study showed that on plastic and skin surfaces, the Alpha, Beta, Delta and Omicron variants showed more than twice the survival time of the Wuhan strain, and maintained infectivity for more than 16 hours. . on the surfaces of the skin “.
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