The United States cancels hundreds of flights for the third day in a row due to omicron

The big airlines of U.S hundreds of flights were canceled this Sunday for the third consecutive day before the advance of the omicron variant of coronavirus, reported the American company Flight Aware, specialized in providing real-time data on flights.

After 12:30 p.m. local time on the east coast of U.S (17.30 GMT), 766 routes that had the North American country as their destination had already been suspended.

That figure of 766 canceled flights is slightly lower than the almost 1,000 on Saturday Christmas and the 700 on Friday Christmas Eve, according to Flight Aware.

Worldwide, 2,316 routes have already been suspended this Sunday, while 8,071 have suffered delays.

Good night, one of the busiest days of the year, has already begun with the suspension of hundreds of itineraries in the United States, but the situation worsened as the day progressed and, in the following two days, the major American airlines announced more cancellations .

According Flight Aware, the companies with the most cancellations are still Delta, with 131 or 5% of its flight plans canceled this Sunday, followed by Jetblue (110 or 10% suspended itineraries) and United (100 or 4%).

United ensures that the increase in infections by omicron in U.S It is having a “direct impact” on the flight crews and the rest of the company personnel, who have to stay at home to recover from the disease and not infect others.

For its part, Delta has attributed the cancellations to omicron, but also to weather conditions with snow storms that threaten the western US, from Washington state to southern California.

However, other US airlines such as American and Southwest have assured that their operations are developing normally and have hardly experienced cancellations.

Those two airlines, however, did have to suspend hundreds of trips at the end of October.

The omicron variant It has caused an increase in infections around the world and has caused some European countries, such as Germany, Portugal and Finland, to reimpose restrictions on the leisure and hospitality sectors.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), this variant has already become the predominant one in the United States, since between last December 12 and 18 it accounted for 73.2% of new cases.

U.S It remains one of the countries hardest hit by the covid-19 pandemic with more than 816,000 deaths and 52.1 million infections since March 2020, indicates the Johns Hopkins University count.

________________________________