The number of people screened by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at U.S. airports is plateauing at around 600,000 per day. Although this is up from the nadir of under 100,000 people per day in April, it’s still a fraction of the roughly 2 million people the agency screened in October last year.
The TSA’s so-called throughput numbers are widely watched by the airline and travel industries as a proxy for travel demand. The last day of normal this year was in early March, when the numbers tracked with 2019’s. By mid-March, the numbers began to slowly decline — as news about the coronavirus in Asia and Europe began to affect travel patterns in the U.S. — and plunged in April to under 100,000 passengers per day. Since then, throughput has steadily risen, especially over the summer.
On October 18, the numbers topped 1 million for the first time since March, which many took to be a sign that the travel had turned a corner. Not so fast, analysts say. “The day traffic hit 1 million was a holiday — Columbus Day,” said Helane Becker, an airline-industry analyst for Cowen & Co. “Since then, there have been two events, Halloween and Election Day, that actively discourage traffic,” she said, explaining that in normal years, travel falls off in the period between those two events.
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