BATWG Newsletter Issue No. 30
The impact that COVID-19 has had on transit and rail service differs widely depending on where in the world you choose to look. Certainly in the United States and Europe transit ridership is down by 70 to 90% but in Asia, after brief but complete shutdowns, it’s near normal. This is largely due to the different approaches used to treat the pandemic. Asian countries like China, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan were able to use a very affective test/trace/isolate approach developed from their experience with previous pandemics like SARS, Bird Flu, H1N1 and Ebola. The Western World, but for a few exceptions (Denmark, Germany, Norway), lacked adequate testing, which is not mandatory and has allowed COVID-19 to spread to such a point that tracing is now both more onerous and less useful.
Even now test results of PCR tests still take days to be returned while not covering the whole population.