Travel Nightmare: More than 3,500 flights canceled worldwide as Omicron rages on

More than 3500 flights have been canceled by airlines around the world as the omicron variant of the coronovirus spreads, triggering chaotic scenes at airports at the busiest time of the year for travel.

According to Flightware, which provides flight tracking data, carriers canceled 2,700 flights on Monday and a further 800 have already been dropped from Tuesday’s schedules.

Pilots, flight attendants and other employees have been calling in sick or having to quarantine after exposure to COVID-19, forcing Lufthansa, Delta, United Airlines, JetBlue, Alaska Airlines and many other short-staffed carriers to cancel flights during one of the year's peak travel periods. 

At least 2000 flights were cancelled in China, including airplanes going in and out of the Xi’an city where more than 13 million people have entered the sixth day of strict lockdown and mandatory testing.

The city has reported an alarming surge in infections, triggering the biggest COVID-19 outbreak in the country since early 2020.

Meanwhile, in Europe, France recorded more than 100,000 virus infections in a single day for the first time in the pandemic on Monday with COVID-19 hospitalizations almost doubling over the past month.

French government has cut on wait time for booster shots to three months hoping to avoid a lockdown on the New Years’ Eve celebration. Masks have become mandatory and a limit to the number of people attending celebrations has also been imposed.   

The government predicts Omicron to be the dominant variant in France in the coming days and weeks.

Thousands of flights canceled globally on Christmas as Omicron rages on

Around 7,500 flights have been cancelled worldwide over the Christmas weekend and thousands more delayed as the highly infectious Omicron Variant brings holiday hurt to millions.

In Britain, Omicron is already a dominant variant of the coronavirus. The number of hospitalized patients has touched a record high since March.

Although, the highly transmissible Omicron variant accounts for more than 90 percent of the cases across the country, the government has decided not to introduce further pandemic-related restrictions, leaving nightclubs and other party hangouts open for the New Years Eve.

In Turkey, the country’s health minster warned about the rapid spread of the new variant, as a thirty percent surge in infections rose to more than 26 thousand cases on Monday.

With more than 120 million doses of Pfizer/BioNTech and China's Sinovac vaccines having been administered, the government has urged people to receive their booster shots.

In the least vaccinated country in the world, the Democratic Republic of Congo is threatened by the fourth wave of the corona virus.

The number of infected cases doubled in the last week, reaching a record high of 6,480. Less than 300 thousand of the 90 million populations in the country have received jabs, primarily due to vaccine hoarding and inequitable vaccine distribution.

Inequitable vaccine distribution is also allowing more deadly variants of the virus to emerge and spread across the globe and is seen as the biggest obstacle to ending the pandemic.

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