Americans ignore health recommendations and travel en masse to celebrate Thanksgiving

A sign recalls the obligation to wear a mask in the departure area of ​​LaGuardia airport (New York), this Wednesday.John Minchillo / AP

Americans seem to have turned a deaf ear to the exhortation of the health authorities and the president-elect himself, Joe Biden, to stay home to prevent the pace of the pandemic from accelerating.

Millions of people are preparing to celebrate this Thursday the most family-friendly holiday of the year, Thanksgiving, which is why airports have registered, with a million travelers a day, their highest activity since spring, when the health crisis began .

Not even the repeated recommendation not to travel from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the government committees that prescribe health standards, has managed to stop the exodus of millions of people to their places of origin. to celebrate the most unusual Thanksgiving ever.

Meanwhile, in major cities, tens of thousands of people continued to swell the ranks in front of pharmacies and laboratories that perform the covid-19 test.

In his speech on the occasion of the holiday, Biden recalled this Wednesday that the disease has already cost the lives of 260,000 Americans and has asked his compatriots to stay at home.

He cited his own family as an example of what common sense dictates in this exceptional year.

“We are going to live this Thanksgiving apart.

Jill [his wife] and I will spend it at our home in Delaware with our daughter and son-in-law.

The rest of the family will do the same in small groups ”, he stressed.

With an average of 160,000 new cases a day, "which could soon reach 200,000" if security is not extreme, Biden stressed, the health system is in some parts of the country on the verge of saturation.

The authorities have expressed their concern about a possible increase in infections due to transfers this week of vacation, the period in which more trips are traditionally made in the country and that culminates with Thanksgiving dinner this Thursday, prologue turn of Christmas.

Despite the CDC's recommendation, this is the week with the highest influx of travelers since the pandemic began in March, with an average of one million movements a day since last weekend, according to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA , in its acronym in English), in charge of airport controls.

The health authorities fear that the movement of people and exchanges between family nuclei, as well as the meetings of non-cohabitants, will further trigger the number of infections in the country, including those areas that so far have managed to keep transmission relatively under control , while the Midwest and the North present the most worrying figures.

In the last two weeks alone, two million new cases of covid-19 have been registered in the country and, if the fears of epidemiologists about the impact of Thanksgiving are confirmed, the month of December and the Christmas season may become in an even blacker period, with 311,000 deaths before the end of the year, according to the most optimistic projections of the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME, in English).

The United States is the country in the world most affected by the pandemic, with more than 12.6 million cases of Covid-19 registered since March, according to the Johns Hopkins University count.

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