Air travel in US back up to 75 per cent of pre-pandemic levels over Memorial Day weekend

Total of 7.1m people passed through airport security checkpoints in US

Air travel in the United States was back up to 75 per cent of pre-pandemic levels over Memorial Day weekend.

The number of Americans flying for the holiday surged massively, according to data released by the Transportation Security Administration, which is in charge over travel security in the US.

A total of 7.1m people went through airport security checkpoints from Friday to Monday, , TSA data showed.

Friday was the busiest day of air travel since the pandemic started, with 1.96m people passing through TSA checkpoints.

And on Monday another 1.9m people were recorded going through security.

Air travel for the 2021 memorial Day weekend was up 450 per cent on 2020, when just 1.3m people went through TSA checkpoints as the pandemic brought the country to a standstill.

And this year’s holiday weekend airport traffic was back to almost three-quarters of the 9.7m people that went through TSA checkpoints during there same weekend in 2019.

More than 33.3m people have tested positive for Covid-19 in the US during the pandemic, which has also killed 594,000 Americans.

But the introduction of vaccines has seen the number of Covid-19 cases in the US plummet to around 23,000 new infections a day in the last week of May, the lowest level in a year. New infections for 29 May were just 12,663, according to the CDC.

Health bosses say that half of all Americans have now had at least one vaccine shot, while 40 per cent of the population is now fully vaccinated, the CDC said.

President Joe Biden has said that he wants 70 per cent of Americans to have had one vaccine shot by the 4 July holiday weekend.

The CDC has also relaxed mask wearing recommendations for those people who are fully vaccinated.