COVID Christmas getaway: One million fly on Friday as holiday travel season kicks off amid pandemic - while 'overrun' California hospitals prepare to ration care and nation sees another 202K cases and 2,814 deaths
The Christmas travel season has begun, even as the nation grapples with a surge in the COVID-19 pandemic that threatens to overrun ICUs in California and has hospitals considering rationing care. On Friday, 1,066,747 passed through Transportation Security Administration airport checkpoints, the agency said, in the first time the number of airline passengers topped one million since the Sunday after Thanksgiving. It is only the sixth day since the pandemic struck the U.S. in March that air travel exceeded one million passengers, and comes despite dire warnings from the CDC urging Americans to skip Christmas travel and remain at home. Meanwhile, an additional 249,709 Americans tested positive for the virus and another 2,814 died on Saturday, according to data from Johns Hopkins. The number of people currently hospitalized nationwide fell slightly below record levels, to 113,929, according to the COVID Tracking Project. California reported more than 43,000 new cases on Saturday, with 272