People infected with the Omicron variant of coronavirus remain infectious for almost the same duration as patients infected with earlier variants of SARS-CoV-2, which is six days minimum, according to a study posted on the preprint server medRxiv.

Investigators obtained blood samples from 56 newly-diagnosed non-hospitalized COVID-19 patients. These included 37 infected with the Delta variant and 19 infected with the Omicron variant. All the participants except one were symptomatic and had mild illness, with flu-like symptoms. None of them needed hospitalization.

All of the participants were found to shed live virus for an average of around 6 days following onset of symptoms regardless of the variant causing the infection (omicron or delta) or the vaccination status of the study subjects including the booster dose. More than half of them had viable virus at day 5, while 25% still had culturable virus on the eight day of the infection. Although not yet peer reviewed, the findings may have public health implications since isolation duration has been reduced to five days from earlier seven days in countries like the US, UK,

Reference

1. Boucau J, et al. Duration of viable virus shedding in SARS-CoV-2 omicron variant infection.  medRxiv, posted March 02, 2022. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.03.01.22271582.