[ianai]

“ Secondary structural analysis of the Omicron variant reveals a higher proportion of alpha-helices than the Delta variant but less extended strand and random coil structures, leading to more structural stability.” It goes on from there.

They found reasons to suspect the omicron variant is all around more resilient to the environment and more contagious. Thus the connection to fomite and aerosol concerns.

[netizen-936824]

First: that is an entirely computational study. Computational studies are a great starting point but must be confirmed with real world tests

Second: stability != surface viability. The study literally mentions nothing about the ability of the virus to survive on inanimate objects. Yes some proteins may be more stable in some cases, but we need to test the viability of actual virus particles taken from actual surfaces after varying residence times

Third: all real world evidence and meta-analyses have come to the conclusion of extremely limited to no viability from fomites

Fourth: the part of the study which mentions stability has the following gem:

>Regarding stability scores, the researchers discovered that the stability across all spike proteins ranged between 32.8 and 34.7, slightly below the value of 40 that indicates a protein is structurally unsound.

These proteins are not very stable to begin with, so marginal improvement over wildtype basically says nothing. Not to mention the article does not mention fomites anywhere at all. So you literally cannot draw that conclusion. That is what shitty popsci reporters do, which is the wrong way to interpret research. We just cannot make logical jumps like that when dealing with insanely complex systems which we don't fully understand.

It's going to take way more than a single, limited computational exploration of protein structural stability to convince me of fomite viability. I'm saying this as a formally trained biochemist

[ianai]

Sorry, I thought you were just yet another denier of anything/everything on the internet.

[netizen-936824]

In my opinion you have nothing to apologize for. My writing tone can come off as abrasive but that's not intentional, so I do apologize for that. There's tons of stuff I don't fully understand either, especially in the bio fields. Computers are complex, but biological systems are more complex by multiple orders of magnitude. Many of these things we don't yet have a full understanding of and the research methods to elucidate biochemical mechanisms are also complex.

It's also possible that I may be wrong about surface viability. I started out in the pandemic assuming the virus is viable on surfaces but after research has come out I have essentially stopped washing my hands altogether (outside of the normal times I did before).

This is difficult for everyone as we all can have varying levels of understanding and different perspectives. Yet we all have to deal with this in the best ways that we can figure out.