Despite all the warnings, the advice to stay at home, and the fact that the more we fly, the longer this COVID-19 pandemic will last, Americans have continued to fly for the holidays. And our pre-Christmas peak in people flying out to see their loved ones is rivalour pre-pandemic numbers.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advised people do not travel for the holidays, instead spend time with the people who already haveady been in their house. If you really must travel, the CDC asked people to think about the impact of this, including overwhelming local hospitals and inadvertently bringing the disease to a previously untouched home.
And yet, the day before Christmas Eve, 1,191,123 people on flights in the United States, NBC reports– the most since March, when the pandemic in this country was still in its infancy. A similar peak was seen during the Thanksgiving holiday season, but March 16 was the last day that more than 1.1 million people flew.
In the week leading up to the Christmas holidays, more than three million people boarded. While those numbers are significantly smaller compared to travel in, say, 2019, it’s still getting higher.
After the Thanksgiving Holiday, COVID-19 cases started to increase, probably as a result of both traveling and closing, without a mask contact with people outside the bubble. In the two weeks following Thanksgiving, the number of COVID-19 cases among TSA agents rose by a national average of 38 percent, Forbes reported.
G / O Media can receive a commission
A similar trend took place in Canada after the country celebrated Thanksgiving in October. Ontario registered a record number of cases two weeks after Thanksgiving, The Washington Post reported. The province responded with a ban on indoor eating and other meeting restrictions.
The extended nature of the winter holidays is now also of additional concern, as this is usually not a one-day affair. Families meet for several days in a row, with an emphasis on visiting as many family members as possible. And that doesn’t even account for the upcoming New Year celebrations, which will likely be their own worm look.
How the travel peak affects the country remains to be seen, but it doesn’t sound like it will be promising.