Rates of assaults among New York City Transit workers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, 2018 - 2023

Violence associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in non-health care essential workers remains underexamined. To address this gap, workplace violence trends in New York City (NYC) transit workers were investigated before, during and after the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Data on workers’ physical assault injuries were extracted from occupational injury and illness recordkeeping logs. Weekly physical assault rates for NYC subway and bus workers, separately and jointly, were calculated per 10 million transit riders, pre, peri, and post- pandemic (2018- 2023), with trends analyzed using joinpoint regression and interrupted-time series analyses. Calculated trends of physical assaults on NYC transit workers per 10 million riders per week indicated a rate of 0.91 between January 2018 and the end of February, 2020. Starting with the onset of COVID-19 in NYC at the beginning of March 2020, amid record-low ridership, the rate rapidly increased to 11.91. By September, 2020, rates decreased to 4.77. These temporal patterns were similar for both bus and subway workers, however, rates were higher among bus workers. The observed spike in workplace assaults during the early acute phase of COVID-19 in 2020 was significantly beyond earlier generally rising trends in NYC transit assaults. Renewed attention to the risk and risk factors for violence targeting transit and other essential workers in general, and most especially during periods of large-scale societal disruptions, is warranted.