Zhang Tianquan

The Spring Festival is coming, the Ministry of Commerce and relevant departments jointly guide the holding of nearly one-month "2022 online New Year goods Festival", in which "origin purchase", "fresh products" and "customized gifts" become the key words of 2022 Spring Festival New Year goods consumption. In this New Year's Festival, major e-commerce platforms are not closed during the Spring Festival.

Due to the recent sporadic cases of novel coronavirus pneumonia in some cities, the 2022 Spring Festival will still be spent under the epidemic, but this will not curb people's enthusiasm and happiness during the festival. Online festivals have become an important alternative, among which online shopping for New Year goods and commodities are becoming more and more prosperous.

However, is online shopping safe? Can you catch the new coronavirus? Among the sporadic cases and asymptomatic infections announced in Beijing, three in Shunyi and one in Xicheng are all related to the cold chain, which has once again raised public concerns about whether online shopping for the New Year, especially cold fresh products and imported products, will be infected with the virus.

In this regard, a just published study has once again broken through people's understanding of the survival time of the novel coronavirus on objects. A research team at Kyoto Medical University Ryhei Hirose found that the Omicron variant survived longer on plastic, human skin and other objects than the original coronavirus and several previous variants. On plastic surfaces, the average survival time of the original, alpha, beta, gamma and Delta variants was 56 hours, 191.3 hours, 156.6 hours, 59.3 hours and 114 hours, respectively, but the Omikron variant could survive for 193.5 hours, or eight days.

Previous studies have suggested that the novel coronavirus is active (infectious) on plastic surfaces at 72 hours; On stainless steel surfaces, the virus can survive for 48 hours, but the infectious viral load is significantly reduced; On cardboard, the virus became less infectious after 24 hours. On copper, COVID-19 was undetectable after four hours. Now, the Omicron variant can survive up to eight days on plastic, so if you buy New Year's shopping and other items with traces of COVID-19, will it spread to people?

First, the Japanese study has not yet been peer-reviewed, and further research is needed to confirm it. Second, the study also suggests that just because Omicron lives for a long time doesn't mean it's infectious in the long run. Because the study, which also tested cadaveric skin samples, found that the original coronavirus strain survived for an average of 8.6 hours, Delta for 16.8 hours and Omicron for 21.1 hours. In other words, Omicron can survive for up to 24 hours on living organisms, so the possibility of human-to-human transmission does not span more than a day, while the Japanese researchers determined that the novel coronavirus can remain infectious on the skin surface for more than 16 hours. Therefore, as long as there is no close contact between people, it is impossible to get infected from online shopping for the New Year.

Even if Omicron survives on objects for the longest time, some of them may be partial nucleic acid remnants of the virus, which does not have overall activity and therefore cannot be transmitted to people. In the past, some imported goods in China tested positive for COVID-19, which only showed that the goods had been contaminated, but it was not confirmed that they were infectious. The infectivity of the novel coronavirus depends on its biological activity, that is, a live virus, and a high viral load. Most of the viruses attached to the surface of goods during long-distance transportation have become dead viruses or nucleic acid fragments of viruses, so it is difficult to infect people.

Most reassuringly, the Japanese study showed that both Omicron and other variants, as well as the original strain, are completely dead and gone after just 15 seconds of contact with an alcohol-containing hand sanitizer on the skin. The researchers' recommendation, therefore, is to use alcohol for hand sanitizer.

The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention has also given advice and guidelines on online shopping and New Year shopping. The outer packaging of online shopping items should not be brought indoors, and the surface of the outer packaging should be disinfected. Wipe or spray the pre-packaged surface with 500 mg/l chlorine-containing disinfectant, and wipe it clean with water after 15 minutes. Or wipe with 75% alcohol 2 times.

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