During Thanksgiving Americans traveled almost as much as they did last year

According to StreetLight Data, despite health officials warnings over Thanksgiving travel many Americans still traveled for the Thanksgiving weekend. As the number of COVID-19 cases across the country soared, officials asked travelers to cancel their Thanksgiving travel plans to slow down the spread of the virus but data shows that most of them did not listen.

Vehicle travel was 5% less than last year’s travel rates, while it was less than year’s past, it showed an increase in travel compared to early November, when vehicle travel was down 20%.

“People were less willing to change their behavior than any other day during the pandemic,” said Laura Schewel, founder of StreetLight Data, to the AP.

Airports were the busiest since the beginning of the pandemic, although still much lower than last year’s travel rates, reported NBC10.

You can read: NJ second wave COVID-19 cases could reach peak December 14

One million passengers were screened on four separate days during the Thanksgiving travel period. Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, topped the charts as the most traveled day since the start of the pandemic.

The consequences

Cindy Friedman, an official from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, illustrated in a briefing this week, the consequences of ignoring the recommendation not to travel during Thanksgiving. “If only a small percentage of those travelers were asymptomatically infected, this can translate into hundreds of thousands of additional infections moving from one community to another.”

The CDC recommended that people across the country stay home to limit the spread, but said if they did travel to get tested, avoid indoor gatherings and quarantine for 14 days after coming home.

In Pennsylvania, there has been an average of 7,373 cases per day, which totals an increase of 28% from just two weeks earlier. Health officials warn if things do not change, hospitals could reach their capacity. There are 7,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19 in the Philadelphia area, according to 6ABC’s Data Journalism Team.