All viruses can live outside the body for short periods of time. So use the usual precautions ...
True but that average is majority -24 hours.
The Chinese absolutely engineered this to be environmentally-hardy, and got their money's worth with every variant successively more hardy, which is the reverse of every prior pandemic.
"The researchers found that on both plastic and skin, the Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Omicron variants all survived twice as long as the Wuhan, and remained infectious for more than 16 hours on skin.Omicron in particular was the most stable of the variants studied. On a plastic surface, it survived for as long as 193.5 hours. (Ed. note: That is +8 DAYS).
The next highest was the Alpha variant at 191.3 hours, while the Wuhan strain lasted just 56 hours.
On skin, Omicron lasted 21.1 hours, while Alpha survived for 19.6 hours and the Wuhan strain for 8.6 hours.
Omicron also appeared to be slightly more resistant to alcohol-based disinfectant than the other variants in vitro (in a test tube or culture dish), however a 40 percent ethanol disinfectant was capable of completely inactivating it within 15 seconds. Other variants needed only 35 percent ethanol disinfectant to achieve the same inactivation time.
"This study showed that the Omicron variant also has the highest environmental stability among VOCs [variants of concern], which suggests that this high stability might also be one of the factors that have allowed the Omicron variant to replace the Delta variant and spread rapidly," the study concluded."