More than one million people passed through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints at airports on Sunday, the highest number in a single day since the coronavirus pandemic brought the country to a halt.
A total of 1,047,934 were screened by TSA on Sunday, still half of the number who were screened on the same day in 2019, but the most since March 16, when the coronavirus really ramped up.
NBC New York reported that the sharp rise has come despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warning Americans to cancel their Thanksgiving plans and avoid celebrating the holiday with people outside their immediate household. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has said in recent days that people should avoid spending time with their extended family.
Fauci said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that people traveling and crowding at airports “are going to get us into even more trouble than we’re in right now.” He added that new cases resulting from Thanksgiving will be seen weeks later.
“I think the people in this country need to realistically do a risk-benefit assessment. Every family is different. Everyone has a different level of risk that they want to tolerate … So you don’t want to call it all off, but you want to say at least give you and your family the benefit of having considered what is the risk-benefit of doing that as opposed to constraining what you do to the very core people who live in your home. You just need to consider it and make your own decision,” Fauci said.
As The Daily Wire reported last week, Fauci told CNN that Americans should do a “risk/benefit discussion” with their families to determine what they will do for the holidays.
“The best words of hope are two things: one of public health and one a scientific issue. The public health issue is that the kind of interventions that I just mentioned work. You’ve got to understand, they do work, we know that as a scientific fact,” Fauci said. “And therefore, implement them. You don’t have to shut down any businesses to do that, you can still have the economy going along in a slow way, in a prudent way staying open. Do that from a public health standpoint.”
“Secondly, from a public health standpoint. Do a risk/benefit discussion with your family about what you’re going to want to do with the holidays,” he continued. “In other words, you might say I have vulnerable people in the family, I have elderly people, I have people with underlying conditions, do you want to get 10, 15, 20 people flying in from different parts of the country. That’s a wonderful, beautiful tradition that we have, but maybe the time now is to take an assessment of that risk/benefit ratio and maybe modify what you’re going to do from now.”
The Daily Wire reported that more than 3 million people traveled between Friday and Sunday.
“According to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), 1,019,836 passengers flew in the U.S. on Friday, 984,369 flew on Saturday, and 1,047,934 flew on Sunday, a total of 3,052,139 passengers,” the outlet reported.