Shipping and Transportation Traffic of Medical and Non-Medical Goods Before and During COVID-19 in Oman

The transportation and logistics services have been severely disrupted starting from February 2020 due to precautionary measures of partial and complete lockdown taken by a number of countries to control the spread of COVID-19. The study aims to investigate the changes in the shipping and transportation traffic of medical and non-medical goods during and before the start of COVID-19 pandemic in Oman. The research question that will be addressed here is “Is there any significant difference in the volume of shipping and transportation traffic of medical and non-medical goods before and during COVID-19 in Oman?” The study applies the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test and Friedman’s two way ANOVA on the data collected from 61 companies operating in Oman. The study found that the shipping and transportation traffic of both medical and non-medical goods decreased by 6.5% and 25.6% respectively during COVID-19. The higher percentage of decrease is noticeable in non-medical goods than the medical.