More than 2,300 flights within, into and out of the U.S. have been canceled as of Friday morning due to the rapidly spreading omicron variant.
Travelers are at Terminal 4 of John F. Kennedy International Airport.
The Xinhua News Agency is pictured.
At 9:30 a.m. 2,341 U.S. flights have been canceled.
Several inches of snow fell on Denver International Airport on Friday morning, along with Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, and New York City's LaGuardia Airport.
Southwest was the U.S. airline with the highest number of canceled flights.
The 2,221 flights that were canceled Thursday are already higher than Friday's cancellation total.
The omicron variant is causing staffing shortages and has already caused 573 U.S. flights to be canceled on Saturday. Alaska Airlines said Thursday that it would cancel 10% of its flights in January due to staffing shortages. On December 30, the airline canceled approximately 1,280 flights through January 13.
The past two weeks have seen a lot of flight cancelations due to omicron-based staffing shortages and the weather. Over the course of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, more than 1,500 flights were canceled in the U.S. One in eight of all US flights were canceled on Monday, the Associated Press reports. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shortened the isolation time for those with Covid-19 from 10 to 5 days in response to the staffing shortages in the airline and other industries. The first major winter storm of the season hit the Northeast on Friday, and as of Thursday night, 37 states were under some form of winter weather alert. In New York City, the storm resulted in more than five inches of snow, while Boston had up to nine inches and Philadelphia had four inches.
Further reading.
Alaska Air trims January flights to deal with a virus outbreak.
More than 2,600 flights were canceled on New Year's Day in the U.S.
More than 1,000 flights were canceled over Christmas.
