Mysuru:  The Coronavirus pandemic has resulted in a sharp decline in the number of Railway and Bus passengers in city. The Mysore Railway Office is witnessing an unprecedented number of cancellation of train bookings over the past one week. Due to poor occupancy rates, the Railways has cancelled 12 trains.

However, the Railways is undecided yet on cancellation of all trains on Mar.22 (Janata Curfew).

Meanwhile, the Railways has set up a Health Desk at the main entrance of City Railway Station. All passengers entering the Station have to undergo thermal screening. Apart from this, the Railway staff were seen marking spaces for the passengers to maintain a safe distance while standing in queues at the ticket counters.

On Thursday, 355 passengers underwent thermal screening during which two passengers whose body temperature was recorded above 100 Degree Celsius, were referred to isolation ward at K.R. Hospital, according to Railway sources. Railway staff B. Parthasarathy, Mohan Kumar Singh, Hanumantha Rao and Balasubramanya are manning the Health Desk from 6 am till 11 pm.

The vehicle parking lot in front of the City Railway Station too has become a casualty of Corona scare, which now wears an almost deserted look. On normal days, Railway parking lot used to have about 180 cars, but with dip in passengers, hardly about  20 cars were seen today. 

Dip in bus passengers

The COVID-19 scare has badly hurt KSRTC too with most buses recording very low occupancy. According to KSRTC authorities, the number of passengers has fallen by nearly 60 percent in the past one week.  KSRTC is yet to decide on halting all bus operations on Mar.22.