The Transportation Security Administration screened more than 1 million air travelers in a single day this weekend for the first time in eight months during the coronavirus pandemic.
TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said that although Sunday’s number is “still 60% lower throughput than one year ago,” the spike in the number of air passengers is the highest one-day total since the number of people screened in the United States bottomed out at only 87,534 people on April 14.
In an early morning tweet on Monday, Farbstein said the agency had screened a little over 1 million people at security points across the nation.
The two preceding days before the eight-month high also signaled an upward trend. On Saturday, roughly 789,000 were screened by the TSA, which was down from Friday when the agency screened more than 937,000 people at airports around the country.
Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the agency screened, on average, 2.5 million passengers a day, according to the group Airlines for America. TSA officials also safeguard the surface transportation sector and were tasked with sorting through nearly 58,000 tons of cargo each day, a number that has fallen sharply this year.
