Terminal 1 at Oakland International Airport (OAK) is home to Alaska Airlines, Allegiant Air, Arkefly, Delta, Hawaiian Air, JetBlue, SATA, Spirit Airways, US Airways, and Volaris. OAK, located at 1 Airport Dr, in Oakland, Calif., is about 10 miles south of downtown Oakland and across from San Francisco on the other side of San Francisco Bay. (Photo courtesy of OAK)

Foot traffic at Oakland International Airport rebounded at a record pace between February and March, likely due to an increase in COVID-19 vaccinations, airport officials said Thursday.

Up nearly 60 percent, 182,000 more people traveled through the airport in March than in February, outpacing other airports in the region. Air cargo traffic was also up sharply.

“As more people are fully vaccinated, we see traffic building toward pre-pandemic levels” said Bryant Francis, Port of Oakland director of aviation.

On a 12-month rolling basis, foot traffic is off about 72 percent this year. About 3.5 million people traveled through the airport, compared with about 12.7 million in the same period a year ago.

Air cargo was up 22.6 percent in March compared to February. Airport crews moved 116 million pounds of cargo in the final month of the first quarter.

Keith Burbank is currently a fulltime reporter covering Alameda County and Oakland news for Bay City News. He has also worked on the Data Points project for Local News Matters, finding trends and stories about the region through data. In 2019, he was a California Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, producing a series about homeless deaths in Santa Clara County. He worked as a swing shift editor for the newswire for several years as well. Outside of journalism, Keith enjoys computer programming, math, economics and music.