A new study has found that Omicron, the highly contagious variant of Covid-19, can survive up to 21 hours on skin and eight days on plastic — much longer than any other variants of concern like Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta, as well as the original strain.
“The Omicron variant has the highest environmental stability among variants of concern (VOCs),” said researchers from the Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine in Japan in their findings. The research showed that that on plastic and skin surfaces, Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Omicron variants exhibited more than two-fold longer survival times than those of the Wuhan strain and maintained infectivity for more than 16 hours on the skin surfaces.
Omicron survived 21.1 hours on skin models from cadavers, followed by the Wuhan virus (8.6 hours), the Gamma (11 hours) and Delta (16.8 hours) variant.
The survival of Alpha (19.6 hours) and Beta (19.1 hours) was found to be similar.
“The Omicron variant has the highest environmental stability among VOCs,” said researchers from the Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine in Japan.
“This high stability might also be one of the factors that have allowed the Omicron variant to replace the Delta variant and spread rapidly,” they said.
Further, the team found that Omicron can survive 193.5 hours (about 8 days) on a plastic (polystyrene) surface, plus three times that of the original strain (56 hours) and of the Gamma variant (59.3 hours), and significantly more than Delta (114 hours) and Beta (156.6 hours).