Coronavirus updates: 84% of California population to go on lockdown Sunday night

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Monday that if safety and efficacy bear out, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could approve Pfizer's vaccine within days of an independent FDA advisory committee meeting on Dec. 10.

"We could be seeing both of these vaccines out and getting into people's arms before Christmas," Azar told CBS. In comparison, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, has said the decision could take a few days or as long as a few weeks.

Moderna announced Monday that it would seek emergency FDA authorization for its vaccine, making it the second U.S. company to do so. Moderna's FDA hearing will be held Dec. 17.

ABC News' Anne Flaherty contributed to this report.

Rhode Island entered a two-week pause Monday, shuttering bars, gyms, movie theaters, bowling allies and indoor sporting facilities. But unlike in many other states, schools will remain open.

"We've really got to shut it down for those two weeks," Gov. Gina Raimondo said at a Nov. 19 press conference. "Because if we do, we can slowly crank up after those two weeks and make it through the end of the year."

The tightened restrictions are in response to rising COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in the state, which has reported 53,954 infections and 1,346 deaths to date.

Rhode Island's pause will remain in effect until Dec. 13.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said it screened 1,176,091 people at its checkpoints in airports across the United States on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, making it the busiest day for air travel since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

The previous pandemic record was set on Wednesday, the day before the holiday, when TSA screened 1,070,967 individuals at airport security checkpoints.

By comparison, 2,882,915 travelers were screened on the Sunday after Thanksgiving last year, which remains the highest volume in TSA history.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it is recommending that Americans do not travel for Thanksgiving.

"It's not a requirement, it's a recommendation for the American public to consider," Dr. Henry Walke, the CDC's COVID-19 incident manager, told reporters during a call on Nov. 19. "Right now, as we're seeing exponential growth in cases and the opportunity to translocate disease or infection from one part of the country to another leads to our recommendation to avoid travel at this time."

ABC News' Sam Sweeney contributed to this report.

New research suggests England has seen roughly a 30% drop in COVID-19 infections three weeks into its second nationwide lockdown.

The Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT) program, run by Imperial College London and research firm Ipsos MORI, is tracking current cases of COVID-19 in England by testing more than 150,000 randomly-selected people each month over a two-week period. An interim report released Monday from the latest round of testing, which includes results from more than 105,000 at-home tests between Nov. 13 and Nov. 24, shows that an estimated 0.96% of England's population -- or around one in 100 people -- is infected with COVID-19.

The study, which is commissioned by England's Department of Health and Social Care, also found that the overall reproduction (R) number has fallen to below 1 -- estimated at 0.88 -- meaning the country's outbreak is currently shrinking rather than growing.

"In this interim report from the seventh round of data collection, we found a reduction in national prevalence of infection by around 30% from the high levels in the latter half of round 6 (26 October to 2 November 2020)," the study's co-authors wrote in the report. "The national prevalence has now dropped to ~1%, a level last seen 6 weeks earlier. This fall in prevalence covers a period of nearly three of the four weeks of the second national lockdown, and is consistent with an observed reduction in the number of daily swab-positive cases recorded in routine surveillance data."

Paul Elliott, professor of epidemiology and public health medicine at Imperial College London and director of the REACT program, called the data "encouraging" for England, which was under a regional tiered system of COVID-19 restrictions before entering lockdown again on Nov. 5. A tougher three-tier system will come into force when the lockdown ends just after midnight on Wednesday.

"We're seeing a fall in infections at the national level and in particular across regions that were previously worst affected. These trends suggest that the tiered approach helped to curb infections in these areas and that lockdown has added to this effect," Elliott said in a statement Monday. "As we approach a challenging time of year, it’s even more vital that through our actions and behaviors we all play our part in helping to keep the virus at bay."