The major airlines of the United States canceled hundreds of flights for the third consecutive day on Sunday due to the advance of the omicron variant of the coronavirus, reported the American company Flight Aware, which specializes in providing real-time data on flights.
After 12:30 pm local time on the east coast of the United States (17:30 GMT), 766 routes that had as their destination the North American country had already been suspended.
That figure of 766 canceled flights is slightly lower than the nearly 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.
Christmas Eve, one of the busiest days of the year, has already started 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 US airlines announced more cancellations.
According to 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%).
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 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 US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), this variant has already become the predominant one in the United States, since between December 12 and 18 it accounted for 73.2% of new cases.
The United States continues to be 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, the Johns Hopkins University count indicates.