More than 4,000 flights were canceled worldwide this Sunday (2), about half of them in the United States, due to bad weather and the increase in Covid cases caused by the omicron variant. More than 11,200 flights were delayed globally.
Christmas and New Year’s are generally responsible for causing spikes in the airline industry, but the rapid spread of the omicron variant has forced airlines to cancel flights after their pilots and crew had to be quarantined – causing a build-up of suspensions and flight delays around the world.
The advance of omicron caused the cancellation of New Year’s festivities in different parts of the world, such as Paris, France, and London, England.
There are more than 2,400 canceled flights on Sunday in the United States, according to the website Flight Aware, which compiles aviation data. SkyWest and SouthWest are among the companies with the most canceled flights, with 510 and 419 respectively.
Cabin crew, pilots and airline support staff across the country were reluctant to work during the holiday season, despite offers of bonuses. Many feared contracting Covid and were reluctant to deal with passengers who do not follow safety rules, industry unions said.
France has included the United States, where new infections are exceeding 300,000 a day, on its red list, meaning that unvaccinated travelers coming from the country will have to be quarantined for 10 days.
The US should focus less on the number of infections and more on the number of hospitalizations and deaths, Anthony Fauci, the country’s top adviser on pandemic-related issues, told an ABC TV show on Sunday.
According to Fauci, many new infections, especially in vaccinated people, result in cases without symptoms or with mild symptoms, making the absolute number of cases less important than in previous variants of the virus.
“The real question you have to worry about,” he said, “is whether we are being protected by the vaccine against serious cases that lead to hospitalization,” he said.
“I’m still very concerned about the tens of millions of people who haven’t been vaccinated because, although many of them will become asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic, a large number of them will become seriously ill,” said Fauci.
.
