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1,500 flights and rising as Canadians seek sunny escapes despite surging COVID-19 crisis | CBC News

1,500 flights and rising as Canadians seek sunny escapes despite surging COVID-19 crisis | CBC News

1,500 flights and rising as Canadians seek sunny escapes despite surging COVID-19 crisis | CBC News
Jan 15, 2021 1 min, 43 secs

Canadian air carriers operated more than 1,500 flights between Canada and 18 popular vacation destinations since Oct. 1, even as caseloads rise and the health crisis deepens.

"With the new state of emergency and recent lockdown measures, why hasn't the government considered restrictions for airline travel either international or even Canadian travel between provinces?" asked Brenda LacLaurin of Ottawa, who contacted CBC News.

CBC News tracked Canadian non-stop flights to and from popular resort destinations using data from Flightradar24.com between Oct.

Of the 1,516 flights analyzed, some of the most popular routes departing from Canada included 214 flights between Toronto and Montego Bay, Jamaica, and 183 flights between Montreal and Cancun, Mexico.

WestJet announced last week it is scaling back operations, suspending several routes to sunny destinations, including flights from Edmonton and Vancouver to Cancun and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, "as the airline continues to face volatile demand and instability.".

Raywat Deonandan, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Ottawa, says the data suggests a small portion of the Canadian public is choosing to disregard public health advice, putting themselves and the countries they visit at risk.

But, he says, to prioritize public health, the government should have been much clearer and directed Canadians from the beginning on what does — and does not — constitute essential travel.

CBC News also asked each province and territory how they define essential travel.

Manitoba, B.C., New Brunswick and Nunavut all offered some descriptions of essential and non-essential travel, with Northwest Territories providing the clearest examples of what to avoid.

The Public Health Agency of Canada has flagged potential COVID-19 exposures on almost 500 international flights since Dec. 1, 2020.

While known cases in Canada linked to international travel represent only one per cent of the country's overall case count, experts caution that still represents 4,239 exposures and contacts tied to a traveller.

CBC News collected one year's worth of data from Flightradar24.com for 169 routes between Canadian international airports and 18 destinations in popular vacation spots, mostly in Mexico and the Caribbean

In all, 5,628 flights were analyzed, 3,042 inbound and 2,586 outbound

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