Within a couple of months, the variant of Covid-19 Omicron has replaced Delta. The reason, as repeatedly explained by scientists, is to be attributed to its extreme contagiousness, but not only. Omicron is indeed capable of last 21 hours on the skin so i 8 days on plastic, therefore much more than the previous mutations. This was revealed by a study by the Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine. “The study showed that Omicron has the highest environmental stability among the variants, suggesting that this feature may be one of the factors that allowed the Omicron variant to replace the Delta variant and to spread very rapidly.”
Omicron: the super resistant variant
Research has shown that Omicron can survive 193.5 hours (approximately 8 days) on a plastic surface, more than three times the original strain (56 hours) and the Gamma variant (59.3 hours), significantly more than Delta (114 hours) and Beta (156.6 hours). Only the Alpha mutation, with 191.3 ava, showed similar resistance. Omicron also survives 21.1 hours on the skin, also in this case much longer than the Wuhan virus (8.6 hours), the Gamma variant (11 hours) and Delta (16.8 hours) could do. On the other hand, the survival of Alpha (19.6 hours) and Beta (19.1 hours) are similar.
Omicron also resistant to disinfectants
Omicron also showed a higher capacity of resist disinfectants than the original virus of Wuhan, but similar to that of the other previously known variants. Another study conducted by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston showed that compared to Delta, Omicron has a much lower viral load. Therefore its high contagiousness would not be linked to a higher viral load, but to the capacity of the virus to evade the immune defenses.