The TSA said that 1,369,180 people passed through security checkpoints on Saturday, a day after flying passengers set a new pandemic record by passing through TSA security with 1,468,516 people. For health professionals, this is a concerning sign: Despite the fact that millions of Americans have been vaccinated, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nevertheless advises against traveling. It has so far declined to publish fresh travel advice for vaccinated Americans, citing concerns raised by travel-related spikes in the United States during recent holiday seasons. “We’ve seen surges after people start traveling, we’ve seen it after July 4, we’ve seen it after Labor Day, we’ve seen it after the Christmas holidays,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said last week during a Covid-19 briefing in response to a question from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. The CDC will hold off on updating guidelines because 90 percent of people are still unvaccinated, according to Walensky. Continue reading A dubious landmark Despite the CDC’s warnings, the airline sector in the United States reached a questionable milestone last week: Air traffic is increasing from a year ago for the first time since the pandemic began. That’s good news for battered airlines, but it’s also a little hurdle to overcome. The growth is still at a low level — around half of what it was before the outbreak in 2019. Nonetheless, the battered airline sector is on the lookout for indicators of sluggish air travel demand. The TSA logged five 1-million-plus days in a row towards the close of the December holiday season. Another encouraging sign is that airlines are reporting higher summer bookings, with American Airlines CEO Doug Parker stating on Monday that the firm is “coming very near to 2019 in overall bookings.” After a combined $32 billion in losses in 2020, excluding exceptional items, all of the airlines are projected to report losses in the first quarter. However, investors are becoming more upbeat: Southwest (LUV), Alaska Air (ALK), JetBlue (JBLU), and Hawaiian Airlines (HA) all have stock prices that are higher than pre-pandemic levels, while American (AAL), Delta (DAL), and Spirit (SAVE) are close to that level. Only United (UAL) stock is much lower than it was in late January 2020. This story was co-written by Chris Isidore, Pete Muntean, and Gregory Wallace of CNN. Continue reading
