TSA reports coronavirus travel record, screening nearly 1.3M travelers Sunday
More than 2.4M people passed through TSA checkpoints over Christmas weekend
The Transportation Security Administration screened nearly 1.3 million travelers on Sunday – the highest number of people to pass through the agency’s security checkpoints in a single day since the beginning of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
TSA agents screened 1,284,599 travelers on the Sunday after Christmas, the agency reported Monday. It’s roughly half of the 2,575,985 people who were checked the same day in 2019, but the highest since mid-March, when fears and government-issued guidelines surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic brought air travel nearly to a halt.
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Travelers wait for their luggage in a terminal at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport on Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic. (Yffy Yossifor/Star-Telegram via AP)
TSA has not reported a higher number of travelers since March 15, when agents screened 1,519,192 people. The agency saw 953,699 travelers the next day and the numbers continued to decline – reaching the lowest point on April 14 with 87,534 people, according to TSA statistics.
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Saturday’s numbers also climbed, with 1,128,773 travelers passing through TSA’s security checkpoints, down from 2,470,786 year-over-year, the agency reported.
Meanwhile, AAA previously predicted that an estimated 81 million Americans would travel by car over the Christmas season, while an estimated 480,000 would do so via buses, trains or cruises.
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Data compiled by Johns Hopkins University and Medicine show that as of Monday morning, the United States had reported 19,151,651 COVID-19 cases and 333,326 virus-related deaths.