Thanksgiving celebrations are filling the airports in the United States to see a further increase in activity since spring, with data collected by the statistics firm Dynata, at the request of the New York Times (NYT), registering more million passengers traveling through the country's airports in the past weekend alone.

Although this increase in activity may indicate that Americans will not comply with the measures recommended by health authorities - namely, avoid agglomerations between households and unnecessary displacement -, the same study cited by the "NYT" reports that only 27% of respondents intends to travel to meet people he doesn't live with. This figure is not far from the results obtained in other surveys conducted by different organizations, such as YouGov, Covid States Projets and researchers at Ohio University, who concluded that less than a third of Americans expect to celebrate Action Day. Thanksgiving as a family or group.

And if among more than 15 thousand respondents, only 27% share their intention to celebrate the holiday with other people, among the 635 epidemiologists and specialists questioned, that percentage drops to 21%.

This reduced margin of people who intend to contradict the recommendations of experts, and even President-elect Joe Biden, indicates that this new approach to the pandemic by the Democratic administration, which is preparing to take office in January 2021, begins to have results on the American population.

This Wednesday, while speaking to the Americans, Biden recalled that the Covid-19 pandemic has already cost the lives of more than 260 Americans. So he asked his countrymen to stay at home, mentioning, as an example, that the family itself will celebrate the holiday separately.

“We are going to celebrate this Thanksgiving Day separately. Jill [his wife] and I are going to spend it at our home in Delaware with our daughter and son-in-law. The rest of the family will do the same in small groups ”, he stressed.

Public health officials are concerned that Thanksgiving Day celebrations could boost a new wave of new confirmed cases, at a time when the country has record numbers of confirmed cases and wards and intensive care units are trying to resist pressure . Traditional holiday celebrations, with long meals indoors, can contribute to more cases of the disease, which spreads mainly through droplets that can remain active in indoor spaces without ventilation.

In the last two weeks alone, two million new cases of Covid-19 have been reported in the United States, and if epidemiologists' fears are confirmed about the impact of Thanksgiving, the month of December and Christmas could become in an even darker period, with 311 thousand deaths before the end of the year, according to the most optimistic projections of the Institute of Metrics and Health Assessment (IHME, in English).

The United States is the country in the world most affected by the pandemic, with more than 12,6 million cases of covid-19 registered since March, according to the Johns Hopkins University count.