NEW YORK — The number of passengers screened for flights in the U.S. topped nearly 1.2 million Wednesday for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic outbreak, but it’s still about 38.5% below the same Wednesday last year, by far the smallest percentage decline since March.
The Transportation Security Administration said Wednesday’s tally of 1.19 million was the most since mid-March.
It’s the third straight daily gain.
On the same weekday a year ago, 1.94 million passengers were screened. However, that was Christmas 2019 when travel was lighter than normal. On several days in early April after the pandemic broadsided the U.S. economy, fewer than 100,000 people were screened to board planes.
The bump comes as the CDC warns that holiday travel may increase one’s chances of getting and spreading the virus. It recommends staying home and postponing travel as the best way to protect oneself from COVID-19.
It’s clear we’re just going to stay in this death spiral until most of us get vaccinated. Even then a significant number will refuse vaccination and the pandemic will rage on in America while other countries will move on from it. Sigh.
A few days ago, NPR’s London correspondent began a report about the new, even-more-virulent strain of COVID sweeping across the UK for weeks with, “I was out Christmas shopping yesterday, and…”
So, apparently, idiocy is not entirely limited to America.
The prediction is that 80 million Americans will travel during the holiday season. Some people may have to, and some may be very careful while traveling, but that’s 1/4 of the nation’s population moving around, and there’s just no way that the virus doesn’t spread when there are already so many people who are infected and asymptomatic out there. It’s more than traveled at Thanksgiving, and that has led us to record high case and death counts (and the wave isn’t complete from that yet), so this is going to be far worse.
The larger wave of death will ramp up before Trump leaves office, but will continue to rise as Biden takes over. The politics of that, well, we will have to see…if the Biden team can start to turn things around and cases go down they will get a lot of credit for it, outside of Republican circles at least. In the end, it’s really the Republican leadership’s fault that things are so bad…if Trump had made mask wearing patriotic then we wouldn’t be here.
This whole episode just makes me sad, and makes me wonder if this is how things are going to be, where a large part of the nation forgoes even basic safety measures because of their selfishness and politics. We can only hope that Biden really can get through to most Americans and break that fever, at least somewhat, otherwise the nation is in for a period of severe turmoil.
I’m sure they’re entirely comprised of only the 1 million who have received the COVID vaccine so far.
Anything else would be foolhardy…
I’ve forgotten the totals now, but it was over a million that flew in the US over Friday-Sunday. Just can’t believe how many stupid people are in the US.