Worldwide coronavirus cases top 30 million

Some 860,000 Americans lost their jobs and filed for unemployment insurance last week, the U.S. Department of Labor said Thursday.

The latest tally shows that the nationwide number of new jobless claims have dropped significantly since peaking at 6.9 million in the last week of March. Still, the figure shatters the pre-pandemic weekly record set in 1982 of 695,000.

More than 29 million people across the country are currently receiving unemployment benefits under state and federal programs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

ABC News' Catherine Thorbecke and Zunaira Zaki contributed to this report.

Dozens of university campuses in major cities across France are reporting COVID-19 outbreaks, according to various local media outlets.

The affected cities reportedly include Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Rennes and Toulouse.

In a recent interview with French newspaper Ouest-France, the country's minister of higher education, Frederique Vidal, said the clusters of cases emerging on university campuses are "mostly linked to private gatherings," such as student parties. Still, Vidal said she wants to maintain in-person classes "because it is important that teachers and students meet," particularly first-year students "who need benchmarks."

French student unions, on the other hand, have laid the blame on overcrowded lecture halls.

Since the start of the academic year, at least 81 schools across France have been closed and 2,100 classes have been cancelled due to COVID-19.

"We have seen around 1,200 new COVID cases among school pupils this week," France's minister of national education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, told reporters Wednesday. "Classes are closed as soon as there are three positive cases."

ABC News' Ibtissem Guenfoud contributed to this report.

A 2-month-old baby in Michigan has died from COVID-19.

Michigan's chief medical executive, Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, announced the infant's death during a press conference Wednesday, while discussing how children are not spared from the novel coronavirus.

"I was so saddened to hear this news," Khaldun said. "My condolences go out to their parents and family."

Nearly 800 children across the United States have been diagnosed with Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), a new pediatric disease associated with COVID-19 that can cause multiple organs to fail, according to Khaldun.

"Studies show that while children are less likely to get severely ill from COVID-19, they still can and they can also pass it on to others," Khaldun said, while urging people to wear masks, wash their hands and maintain social distancing.

"COVID-19 is not something to be taken lightly," she added.

Twenty children under the age of 1 have died of COVID-19 nationwide as of Sept. 12, according to the latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

An internal memo from the Federal Emergency Management Agency obtained by ABC News on Wednesday night showed that the current national trend in new cases is only slightly down while the trend in new deaths is way up.

There were 261,204 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the United States during the period of Sept. 9-15, a 0.7% decrease from the previous week. Meanwhile, 5,906 coronavirus-related deaths were recorded during that same period, a 16.6% increase compared with the seven days prior, according to the FEMA memo.

The national positivity rate for COVID-19 tests currently stands at 4.4%, a 0.1% decrease over the past week, according to the memo.

ABC News' Josh Margolin contributed to this report.