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

In this week's briefing for governors, the White House Coronavirus Task Force urged all Americans over the age of 65 or with significant health conditions to avoid "any indoor public spaces where anyone is unmasked.”

The briefing said those under 40 years old who saw anyone outside their household for Thanksgiving should assume they're infected and must isolate.

“The COVID risk to all Americans is at a historic high," according to the briefing, which was obtained by ABC News. "The national daily COVID incidence after Memorial Day, but before the summer surge, was fewer than 25,000 new cases/day and is now more than 180,000 new cases/day; COVID inpatients then were fewer than 30,000 but are now more than 90,000; fatalities have more than doubled."

"We are in a very dangerous place due to the current, extremely high COVID baseline and limited hospital capacity; a further post-Thanksgiving surge will compromise COVID patient care, as well as medical care overall," the briefing said.

-ABC News' Josh Margolin and Brian Hartman

Russian President Vladimir Putin has asked his deputy prime minister for social policy to begin large-scale COVID-19 vaccinations next week using the Russian-developed Sputnik V vaccine.

Putin said doctors and teachers will be the first to be vaccinated.

Last week, Russia’s health minister said mass vaccination would not start until January or February.

Russia claimed to be the first in the world to register a COVID-19 vaccine in August, approving it even before starting the key Phase III trial.

-ABC News' Patrick Reevell

Dr. Moncef Slaoui, chief science adviser to Operation Warp Speed, said he expects the U.S. Food and Drug Administration "to reach a similar conclusion" to the United Kingdom's approval of a COVID-19 vaccine developed by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.

"I hope by the 10th or 11th of December the Pfizer vaccine is approved," Slaoui told ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos in an interview Wednesday on "Good Morning America."

Slaoui urged Americans to "listen to the experts" and trust the vaccine approval process.

"No corners have been cut," he said. "The [vaccine] development has been done very quickly because we had great science to allow us to do all the discovery work in weeks rather than in years. And then the clinical work, the most important part that demonstrates the effectiveness of the vaccine and its safety, has been done to a higher standard than what's done normally in larger number of people but will be assessed and studied in an ongoing basis."

Slaoui described a vaccine as "an insurance against this virus."

"This is what will get us out of the pandemic," he said.

There were 180,098 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the United States on Tuesday, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

It's the 29th straight day that the country has reported over 100,000 newly diagnosed infections. Tuesday's count is down from a peak of 205,557 new cases last Friday.

An additional 2,597 fatalities from COVID-19 were also registered nationwide on Tuesday, just under the all-time high of 2,609 new deaths on April 15.

COVID-19 data may be skewed in the coming days and weeks due to possible lags in reporting over Thanksgiving followed by a potentially very large backlog from the holiday.

A total of 13,725,917 people in the United States have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 270,669 of them have died, according to Johns Hopkins. The cases include people from all 50 U.S. states, Washington, D.C. and other U.S. territories as well as repatriated citizens.

Much of the country was under lockdown by the end of March as the first wave of pandemic hit. By May 20, all U.S. states had begun lifting stay-at-home orders and other restrictions put in place to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. The day-to-day increase in the country's cases then hovered around 20,000 for a couple of weeks before shooting back up over the summer.

The numbers lingered around 40,000 to 50,000 from mid-August through early October before surging again to record levels, crossing 100,000 for the first time on Nov. 4 and reaching 200,000 for the first time on Nov. 27.