Vehicles halted at the curb in intermittent intervals at Long Beach Airport Wednesday, typically among the busiest travel days of the year. People said goodbye, hugged and wheeled luggage on the way to Christmas destinations.
A mother embraced her children with tears in her eyes before heading into the terminal in Long Beach and excited children exclaimed “grandpa!” as the door to a minivan opened up and whisked them away.
They were all part of millions of Americans that ignored pleas from public health officials to not travel for the holidays as the United States continues to fail to stop a massive surge in COVID-19 cases.
While substantially fewer travelers are boarding planes compared to last year, almost one million passengers per day have been processed at domestic airports over the past week, according to data from the Transportation Security Administration.
At LGB, the reasons for travel ranged from plainly spending time with relatives and keeping up Christmas traditions to others just finishing out the last leg of a vacation. Others, however, had more somber reasons for boarding a plane this week.
Joan Busby flew to Long Beach from her home in Marin County to spend time with her 85-year-old father. Her mother passed away two years ago on Christmas Eve and the family has held a “heavenly anniversary” for her mother each year since.
Busby said she’s followed nearly every guideline, practically sheltering in place since March, wearing a mask in public and getting a coronavirus test before boarding her flight. Her flight was mostly empty and the mostly touchless experience of flying put her mind at ease that she might help spread the virus further.
“It was a risk we both chose to take,” Busby said. “I don’t know I would’ve traveled if both my parents were dead or if they lived closer to me.”
Another traveler from the Bay Area, who identified herself as Kathy, said there were about 35 people on her flight and she felt safe during the flight despite the rising number of COVID-19 cases.
Kathy said she had a long discussion with her son and daughter, who is a nurse, before agreeing to board the flight to Long Beach to spend Christmas with her son. She lost her husband this year from a non-COVID related illness and her children insisted she travel to be with one of them.
“They were both adamant that I wouldn’t be alone for the holidays,” she said.
Kate Kuykendall, a public affairs officer for Long Beach Airport, said that while travel may be up this week, overall travel for the month of December is expected to be down compared to last year. While those numbers are not official yet, it’s likely that they’ll mirror the figures from November, which saw passenger activity at Long Beach over 80% lower than the same month of 2019.
“I think its definitely correlated to travelers’ concerns over the pandemic,” Kuykendall said. “I think it’s a positive thing that travelers are taking the health directives seriously and avoiding non-essential travel and we support travelers taking that responsible decision.”
Kuykendall confirmed that about 1,200 passengers were scheduled to fly into or out of Long Beach Wednesday but said that is well below a typical day where the airport would average about 10,000 travelers per day.
Load factors—the number of people on each flight—are down, she said, but the travel volume is comparable to the holiday travel period around the Thanksgiving holiday, which many public health experts have attributed the recent spike of cases and hospitalizations to.
This week, county health officials said that just 30 ICU beds remain in the county and local hospitals could soon be faced with another surge of patients brought on by Christmas gatherings.
Even with that in mind, Americans have continued to board airplanes.
As he sat waiting for a friend to pick him up from the passenger drop off area outside the main terminal, Adam, sat a table writing in a notebook. He had flown from Oakland to visit a friend for the night with plans of flying back home to Colombus, Ohio Thursday.
Adam said he’d contracted COVID-19 earlier in the year and got very sick and he thinks he contracted it on an airplane. He said he normally wears two masks while in the cabin and has been avoiding large gatherings. But to him, traveling seems to be safer than other daily activities like going to a grocery store, he said.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone not wear a mask at an airport,” he said. “I don’t want to get it again, and I certainly don’t want to give it to anyone else.”
[Editors note: The original story said that 1,200 people were expected to travel Thursday. That number of people was expected to travel Wednesday.]