WASHINGTON (Reuters/AFP) -- More than 3,600 flights were cancelled around the world on Sunday, more than half of them U.S. flights, adding to the toll of holiday week travel disruptions due to adverse weather and the surge in coronavirus cases caused by the Omicron variant.
Over 3,600 flights had been cancelled by afternoon GMT on Sunday, including over 2,100 entering, departing from or within the United States, according to a running tally on the tracking website FlightAware.com. Including those delayed but not cancelled, more than 6,400 flights were delayed in total.
Among the airlines with maximum cancellations were SkyWest and SouthWest with each having over 400 cancellations, the FlightAware website showed.
The Christmas and New Year holidays are typically a peak time for air travel, but the rapid spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant has led to a sharp increase in COVID-19 infections, forcing airlines to cancel flights as pilots and crew quarantine.
Transportation agencies across the United States were also suspending or reducing services due to coronavirus-related staff shortages.
Omicron has brought record case counts and dampened New Year festivities around much of the world.
The rise in U.S. COVID-19 cases had caused some companies to change plans to increase the number of employees working from their offices from Monday.
U.S. authorities registered at least 346,869 new coronavirus on Saturday, according to a Reuters tally. The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 rose by at least 377 to 828,562.
Meanwhile, Europe recorded over 100 million coronavirus cases, more than a third of all infections worldwide, since the start of the pandemic, an AFP tally showed.
The continent has once again become the pandemic’s epicenter in recent months, and is battling an upsurge of cases spurred on by the highly transmissible Omicron strain of the virus.
The European region, including 52 countries and territories from the Atlantic coast to Azerbaijan and Russia, has recorded 100,074,753 infections of COVID-19 over the past two years, an AFP tally of official figures showed.
That is equivalent to more than a third of the 288,279,803 cases declared worldwide since the outbreak of the pandemic in late 2019 in China.
Of the European infections, more than 4.9 million have been reported over the past seven days alone, with 17 out of 52 countries or territories beating their previous record of most cases in a single week.
France alone has recorded more than one million new cases over the past week, which is equivalent to 10 percent of all positive cases it has announced since the start of the pandemic.
The countries with the highest ratio of infections per 100,000 inhabitants in the world were all in Europe. Denmark scored worst with 2,045, followed by Cyprus with 1,969 and Ireland with 1,964.
Europe recorded on average 3,413 coronavirus deaths a day over the past week, a seven percent drop from the previous week. At its worst, that average saw 5,735 deaths a day in January last year.