Air travel hit a pandemic-era high Sunday, with hordes of people taking trips for the Thanksgiving holiday despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention strongly advising against so.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said 1,047,934 people passed through security at U.S. airports Sunday, the second time more than a million passengers have been processed since Friday.
The previous record was set on Sunday, Oct. 18 during the Columbus Day weekend.
Despite the spike from holiday travelers, the amount of people screened daily is still drastically less than the pre-pandemic levels. For example, 2,321,546 people took to the air a year ago from Sunday, according to TSA statistics.
TSA Administrator David Pekoske said he expects Wednesday and next Sunday afterward to be the busiest for air travel, CNN reported.
The number of coronavirus cases in the country has risen steadily in recent weeks, with the daily number of new cases exceeding 100,000 every day since Nov. 4 after not hitting that mark once during the entire pandemic.
As of Monday, the U.S. has more than 12.2 million cases and 256,000 related deaths — both tops globally — according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker.