U.S. airports screened fewer than a half-million passengers Tuesday, hitting a six-month low just weeks after the Christmas holidays brought record numbers of travelers.
The Transportation Security Administration said 468,933 passengers were screened at checkpoints Tuesday, the first time that the daily number dropped below 500,000 since July 4, CNN reported.
By comparison, TSA screened nearly 1.3 million people on Dec. 27, the Sunday after Christmas — the most since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
But even as the Biden administration has increased international travel restrictions to help slow the virus’s spread, the U.S. has easily outpaced the rest of the world in both coronavirus cases and related deaths, with roughly 25.5 million cases and 426,000 deaths as of Wednesday, according to data from a Johns Hopkins University tracker.