Presidents Day Weekend Prompts Another Holiday Travel Surge

It seems that Americans are eager to take advantage of the President’s Day long weekend, as over a million people passed through Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport checkpoints on Thursday.

The TSA reported having screened a total of 1,034,514 travelers around the country yesterday, marking the first occasion since the start of January that passenger counts exceeded one million in a single day. Possibly, today’s tally will be even higher.

The pandemic record of 1,327,289 airline passengers was set on January 3, as a throng of Christmas and New Year’s travelers were headed home, according to USA Today. The 2020 holiday season having proved busier than anticipated in terms of travel, passenger counts actually topped one million on 12 days, beginning the Friday before Christmas.

Yesterday’s numbers are still down 57 percent from the same weekday last year while COVID-19 cases continue to multiply across the country—which suggests that at least some Americans are heeding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) ongoing advisory to avoid travel.

“First and foremost, I would really encourage people to not travel,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky affirmed during a White House briefing on February 8.