STRANGE DAYS

HOW DID COVID CHANGE TRAVEL? YOU HAD A LOT TO SAY

- DANIAL ADKISON

If the sudden arrival of Covid jolted your travel plans five years ago, you are not alone.

I was visiting family in Honolulu when the shutdowns began: First restaurants and bars closed, then nonessential stores, finally the beaches.

As stories of stranded travellers filled the news, I panicked and jumped on a plane back to New York (looking back, I realise this seems like a dubious decision). My connecting flight from Chicago had four passengers and six cabin crew members all maskless. At LaGuardia, dazed employees sat on the frozen baggage carousels. One worker wheeled my suitcase out from an office. It was the only checked bag.

On March 19, Governor Gavin Newsom of California issued a statewide stay-at-home order, seeking to limit the spread of the disease by curtailing nonessential travel. By March 28, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had issued a domestic travel advisory for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Nonessential travel had mostly halted by the end of the month.

In April 2020, only 3.28 million passengers flew globally, a far cry from the 86.96 million in April 2019. The world would not see that many airline passengers again until the summer of 2022.

Since then, we've ridden a roller coaster of mask mandates, social distancing, vaccines, breakthrough infections, "revenge travel" and overtourism. Travel has rebounded to prepandemic levels, according to the World Economic Forum, but Covid and long Covid is also still very much with us. Covid has killed at least 7 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and it's still a leading cause of death in the United States.