By Bronson Jayamanna
Virginia, U.S.A. (C.W.B.N.)_ It seems that the COVID-19 pandemic, cannot do much to subside the number of Americans who have resumed their annual holiday travel.
While the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.) stressed that it is safer to remain at home this December (a reinforcement of its thanksgiving message), on 18 and 19 December, the Transportation Security Administration (T.S.A.) ended up screening more than two million passengers as the end of year work and school holidays commenced.
1,066,747 passengers and 1,073,563 people were screened at T.S.A. checkpoints across all national airports on Friday and Saturday, respectively. This is the first time since the start of the CVOID-19 in March, that passenger screening had crossed 1 million on two consecutive days said T.S.A. spokesperson Lisa Farbstein. These past two days have also marked the sixth and seventh days of that passenger counts have surpassed a million. April 14 was the least busy day for U.S. air travel, with the T.S.A. processing only 87,534 individuals according to the U.S.A. Today.
Numbers this weekend are still slightly smaller than last year—about 40% of the values reported in 2019 on the same days—but maybe better than anticipated as the country continues to set regular records for new COVID-19 events, hospitalizations, and fatalities.
Also, this year, the C.D.C. cautioned Americans against flying for Thanksgiving. At the same time, 9.4 million passengers ended up taking a flight during the Thanksgiving holiday. During the transit scramble that lasted from Friday before Thanksgiving to Sunday after the holiday, passenger counts peaked one million on four separate days, hitting a high of 1,176,091 on November 29.
