Good news about train travel

I took a series of trains from Munich to Florence this summer, via Innsbruck, Verona and Venice, travelling first class in almost empty carriages, and had no worries. Now I'm pleased to read Peter Hitchens today in the Mail on Sunday reporting scientists saying we are not likely to catch the Coronavirus on trains. 

Certainly we are not if they are almost empty. I hadn't really noticed, till this pesky virus, how very rare windows you can open are now. I regret this anyway and especially now.

"The [British] Rail Safety and Standards Board recently concluded after experiments that the risk of infection per passenger journey is only one in 11,000.
" The German train operator Deutsche Bahn made a safety survey and found: ‘We see remarkably few infections in trains. No infections occurred in persons on board with a stay of less than ten hours.
"Not a single contact tracing has been identified in Germany and Austria as having been triggered by an infection on the train journey.’"

Three days ago CNN informed us that air travel is relatively safe.

In one case, about 328 passengers and crew members were tested for coronavirus after it was learned that a March 31 flight from the US to Taiwan had been carrying 12 passengers who were symptomatic at the time. However, all the other passengers tested negative, as did the crew members.

And while there have certainly been cases of infected passengers passing the virus on to an airplane's crew or fellow travelers in recent months, the transmission rates are low.

A study recently published in medical journal JAMA Network Open found evidence of the possible spread of coronavirus during a four-hour flight from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt in March.Two passengers developed infections after flying with a group of tourists who had come into contact with an infected hotel manager and also became infected, according to researchers from the Institute for Medical Virology at Goethe University in Frankfurt.

The two who may have been infected were seated at the back of the aircraft, directly across the aisle from seven passengers who had unknowingly picked up the virus.

 CNN goes on, contradicting itself:

An earlier flight from the UK to Vietnam on March 2, in which one passenger seemingly spread the virus to around 14 other passengers, as well as a crew member, is so far believed to be the only known on-board transmission to multiple people.