{"id":24039,"date":"2025-03-15T08:00:45","date_gmt":"2025-03-15T09:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=24039"},"modified":"2025-03-15T09:31:29","modified_gmt":"2025-03-15T09:31:29","slug":"how-did-covid-change-travel-readers-had-a-lot-to-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=24039","title":{"rendered":"How Did Covid Change Travel? Readers Had a Lot to Say."},"content":{"rendered":"
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The ups and downs of the last five years have had a huge impact on how we fly, where we go and whether we travel at all. We asked readers to share their stories.<\/p>\n

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If the sudden arrival of Covid jolted your travel plans five years ago, you are not alone.<\/p>\n

I was visiting family in Honolulu when the shutdowns began: First restaurants and bars closed, then nonessential stores, finally the beaches.<\/p>\n

As stories of stranded travelers filled the news, I panicked and jumped on a plane back to New York (looking back, I realize this seems like a dubious decision). My connecting flight from Chicago had four passengers and six cabin crew members \u2014 all maskless. At LaGuardia, dazed employees sat on the frozen baggage carousels. One worker wheeled my suitcase out from an office. It was the only checked bag.<\/p>\n

On March 19, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California issued a statewide stay-at-home order<\/a>, seeking to limit the spread of the disease by curtailing nonessential travel. By March 28, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had issued a domestic travel advisory<\/a> for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Nonessential travel had mostly halted by the end of the month. In April 2020, only 3.28 million passengers<\/a> flew globally, a far cry from the 86.96 million in April 2019. The world would not see that many airline passengers again until the summer of 2022.<\/p>\n

Since then, we\u2019ve ridden a roller coaster of mask mandates, social distancing, vaccines, breakthrough infections, \u201crevenge travel\u201d and overtourism<\/a>. Travel has rebounded to prepandemic levels<\/a>, according to the World Economic Forum, but Covid \u2014 and long Covid \u2014 is also still very much with us. Covid has killed at least seven million people<\/a> worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and it\u2019s still a leading cause of death<\/a> in the United States.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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As the fifth anniversary of the pandemic approached, we asked readers<\/a> to share how Covid changed the way they travel. The 762 responses we received tended to fall into five major categories: They were jumping into \u201clife is short\u201d travel, making up for lost time; they were focusing on family trips; they were limiting travel to avoid danger, cost, discomfort or crowds; or they weren\u2019t traveling at all, often because of illness or fear.<\/p>\n

The responses included life transformations of all kinds. Sara Burnett, 41, of Alpine, Texas, wrote that she <\/strong>spent four months in Egypt learning to free dive, and now dives for Team U.S.A<\/a>. \u201cI went from doing nothing to extreme sport athlete,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

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The ups and downs of the last five years have had a huge impact on how we fly, where we go and whether we travel at all. We asked readers to share their stories.If the sudden arrival of Covid jolted your travel plans five years ago, you are not alone.I was visiting family in Honolulu when the shutdowns began: First restaurants and bars closed, then nonessential stores, finally the beaches.As stories of stranded travelers filled the news, I panicked and jumped on a plane back to New York (looking back, I realize this seems like a dubious decision). My connecting flight from Chicago had four passengers and six cabin crew members \u2014 all maskless. At LaGuardia, dazed employees sat on the frozen baggage carousels. One worker wheeled my suitcase out from an office. It was the only checked bag.On March 19, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California issued a statewide stay-at-home order, seeking to limit the spread of the disease by curtailing nonessential travel. By March 28, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had issued a domestic travel advisory for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Nonessential travel had mostly halted by the end of the month. In April 2020, only 3.28 million passengers flew globally, a far cry from the 86.96 million in April 2019. The world would not see that many airline passengers again until the summer of 2022.Since then, we\u2019ve ridden a roller coaster of mask mandates, social distancing, vaccines, breakthrough infections, \u201crevenge travel\u201d and overtourism. Travel has rebounded to prepandemic levels, according to the World Economic Forum, but Covid \u2014 and long Covid \u2014 is also still very much with us. Covid has killed at least seven million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and it\u2019s still a leading cause of death in the United States.As the fifth anniversary of the pandemic approached, we asked readers to share how Covid changed the way they travel. The 762 responses we received tended to fall into five major categories: They were jumping into \u201clife is short\u201d travel, making up for lost time; they were focusing on family trips; they were limiting travel to avoid danger, cost, discomfort or crowds; or they weren\u2019t traveling at all, often because of illness or fear.The responses included life transformations of all kinds. Sara Burnett, 41, of Alpine, Texas, wrote that she spent four months in Egypt learning to free dive, and now dives for Team U.S.A. \u201cI went from doing nothing to extreme sport athlete,\u201d she wrote.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24041,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24039"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24042,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24039\/revisions\/24042"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}