A staggering 299,087 new cases were confirmed over the past 24 hours.
A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now infected more than 84.6 million people worldwide and killed over 1.8 million of them, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
The U.S. has seen a record high daily death toll for the second day in a row, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
There were 3,744 COVID-19 deaths reported Wednesday, the highest since start of the pandemic, surpassing the previous record of 3,725 deaths reported Tuesday.
In the wake of the Trump administration falling short on its vaccination goal, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams told "Good Morning America" Thursday, “We always knew that this was going to take a while to ramp up."
"The curve is rapidly increasing, in terms of number of people being vaccinated," Adams said. "So we shouldn't extrapolate from what happened yesterday to what's going to happen six months from now. What we should do is make sure that curve continues to go up and continue to support our state and public health departments, which is what we are doing."
The Trump administration had promised that 20 million people would be vaccinated by the end of the year.
As of Wednesday morning, 2,794,588 Americans had received vaccine doses and 12.4 million doses had been distributed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"There's vaccines manufactured. There's vaccines allocated. There’s vaccines delivered. And then there's vaccines put in arms,” Adams said. “From a federal perspective, we are on track to have 20 million people able to be vaccinated, doses on the ground, by the end of next week.”
Adams also urged Americans to celebrate New Year's Eve virtually.
“This has been a marathon, but we don't want to trip at the finish line,” Adams said. “We want to have a normal New Year’s next year, we want as many of our loved ones and family and friends as possible to be able to enjoy that New Year’s in 2021. The way we do that is by pulling together and sacrificing one more time so that we can ramp up these vaccinations and put this virus away for good.”
ABC News’ Ben Gittleson contributed to this report.
The U.S. reported 3,903 deaths on Wednesday, a new record for daily fatalities, according to The COVID Tracking Project.
Hospitalizations also reached a record high with 125,220 and there were 225,671 new cases, according to the tracking project.
"Holiday reporting delays are still markedly affecting testing, case, and deaths figures," the group tweeted.
The COVID Tacking Project said the death count included a backlog of 200 fatalities from Washington state.
"Even without this backlog, today's total would still be the highest to date," the tracking project tweeted.
It warned that more data disruptions are expected with the New Year's Day weekend.
Texas health officials announced a record 326 deaths on Wednesday.
The previous record was set on July 23 with 278 deaths, according to health data.
The state had 17,458 new daily cases and 11,992 hospitalizations, according to the health department. There are currently 602 intensive care unit beds remaining in Texas, health officials said.
