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European countries struggled to fight against the second and the third waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the Test-Trace-Isolate (TTI) strategy widely adopted over the summer and early fall 2020 failed to contain the spread of the disease effectively. This paper sheds light on the effectiveness of such a strategy in two European countries (Spain and Italy) by analysing data from June to December 2020, collected via a large-scale online citizen survey with 95,251 and 43,393 answers in Spain and Italy, respectively. Our analysis describes several weaknesses in each of the three pillars of the TTI strategy: Test, Trace, and Isolate. We find that 40% of respondents had to wait more than 48 hours to obtain coronavirus tests results, while literature has shown that a delay of more than one day might make tracing all cases inefficient. We also identify limitations in the manual contact tracing capabilities in both countries, as only 29% of respondents in close contact with a confirmed infected individual reported having been contact traced. Moreover, our analysis shows that more than 45% of respondents report being unable to self-isolate if needed. We also analyse the mitigation strategies deployed to contain the second wave of coronavirus. We find that these interventions were particularly effective in Italy, where close contacts were reduced by more than 20% in the general population. Finally, we analyse the participants' perceptions about the coronavirus risk associated with different daily activities. We observe that they are often gender- and age-dependent, and not aligned with the actual risk identified by the literature. This finding emphasises the importance of deploying public-health communication campaigns to debunk misconceptions about SARS-CoV-2. Overall, our work illustrates the value of online citizen surveys to quickly and efficiently collect large-scale population data to support and evaluate policy decisions to combat the spread of infectious diseases, such as coronavirus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The COVID-19 emergency and the cities lockdown have had a strong impact on transport and mobility. In particular, travel demand has registered an unprecedented overall contraction, dramatically dropping down with peaks of - 90%-95% passengers for public transport (PT). During the re-opening phase, demand is gradually resuming the levels before the crisis, although some structural changes are observed in travel behaviour, and containment measures to reduce the risk of contagion are still being applied, affecting transport supply. Objective: This paper aims at assessing to what extent keeping a one-meter interpersonal distancing on-board trains is sustainable for public transport companies. Method: The analysis is based on travel demand forecasting models applied to two case-studies in Italy: a suburban railway line and a High-speed Rail (HSR) line, differentiated by demand characteristics (e.g. urban vs. ex-urban) and train access system (free access vs. reservation required). Results: In the suburban case, the results show the need of new urban policies, not only limited to the transport domain, in order to manage the demand peaks at the stations and on-board vehicles. In the ex-urban case, the outputs suggest the need for public subsidies in order for the railways undertakings to cope with revenue losses and, at the same time, to maintain service quality levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]