COVID-19 cases aren’t the only thing taking off recently.
The Transportation Security Administration reported that nearly 1.2 million people grabbed a flight for the holidays on Wednesday, the most passengers in a single day since March 16, just three days after President Trump declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency and three days before California became the first state in the country to announce a stay-at-home order.
Air travel in the United States has gradually grown in spurts and stops since its April nadir of just 87,534 flights.
Thanksgiving brought another jump in travel, reaching 1,070,967 on Nov. 25 and 1,176,091 the Sunday of the holiday weekend before falling back below the 1 million mark until December holiday travel.
Wednesday’s flights may be a record for the pandemic, but it still falls well below last year’s figures — nearly 2 million travelers were screened by the TSA on Dec. 23, 2019. Between March and December 2019, there were fewer than 30 days that had fewer than 2 million passengers. In that same time frame this year, only five days surpassed the 2 million figure.
Airlines have been ravaged by the pandemic amid the dearth of both travelers and federal support. In September, airlines laid off tens of thousands of workers. Earlier this month, Southwest, which had avoided early fall layoffs by rolling out pay cuts, warned that it may have to lay off as many as 6,800 employees by spring, the first layoffs in the company’s 50-year history, according to CNN.
Airlines are expected to receive roughly $15 billion for payrolls in the relief package Congress passed that awaits Trump’s signature.
Meanwhile, officials are warning that holiday travel and large in-person gatherings will only exacerbate an already dire situation.
When air travel ground to a halt in April, COVID-19 cases in the U.S. peaked at 34,000 cases in a single day, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. On Wednesday, as air travel edged back toward near-normal levels, the U.S. reported 131,000 cases. The U.S. has not reported fewer than 100,000 cases since before Election Day, and it hasn’t reported fewer than 34,000 cases since late September.
Caseloads have risen in tandem with increased testing, which now far outstrips the early days of the pandemic, but hospitalizations and deaths now also surpass the worst of the spring — the U.S. reported 3,359 cases, nearly 1,000 more deaths in a single day than the April peak.