Coronavirus updates: US reports nearly 300,000 new cases in all-time high

Forty-two people in West Virginia received the Regeneron monoclonal antibody treatment instead of the Moderna vaccine on Wednesday at a vaccination clinic hosted by staff at the Boone County Health Department, the West Virginia National Guard confirmed to ABC News.

Medical experts with the Joint Interagency Task Force do not believe there is any risk of harm to these 42 individuals. Everyone who received the monoclonal antibody has been contacted, or is in the process of being contacted, according to the West Virginia National Guard.

“The moment that we were notified of what happened, we acted right away to correct it, and we immediately reviewed and strengthened our protocols to enhance our distribution process to prevent this from happening again,” Maj. Gen. James Hoyer, Adjutant General of the West Virginia National Guard, said in a statement.

The Regeneron treatment was administered intramuscularly, like a traditional vaccination, according to the West Virginia National Guard. The Regeneron treatment, which was given FDA emergency authorization in November, is normally given as an intravenous infusion, not an intramuscular injection.

The recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is that for those who receive antibody treatments, "vaccination should be deferred for at least 90 days, as a precautionary measure until additional information becomes available, to avoid interference of the antibody treatment with vaccine-induced immune responses."

A West Virginia National Guard official told ABC News that "there are no concerns that this will set individuals back 90 days" and that "all 42 individuals are being offered the vaccine today."

ABC News' Arielle Mitropoulos contributed to this report.

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeted Thursday morning that his wife had been admitted to a hospital because of complications with her cancer treatment. He said he wasn’t allowed to visit her because of COVID-19-related restrictions.

Adams’ wife, Lacey Adams, was first diagnosed with metastatic melanoma in 2018.

“I’m hoping she doesn’t have to spend New Year’s in a hallway because the beds are full,” Adams tweeted.

ABC News’ Ben Gittleson and Tom Dunlavey contributed to this report.

At least 342,734 lives have been lost to COVID-19 in the U.S., representing approximately 18.9% of the total global death toll of 1.8 million people.

One in every 965 Americans has now died from the virus, according to ABC News’ of data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project.

The U.S. death toll is 114 times the total lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001, and just over half the total number of deaths that were recorded in U.S. during the 1918 influenza pandemic.

At least 19.7 million Americans have tested positive for COVID-19 in the 345 days since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first U.S. case on Jan. 21.

That means about 1 in every 16 Americans has contracted the virus.

ABC News' Arielle Mitropoulos contributed to this report.

The oldest resident of Massachusetts, 112-year-old Hazel Plummer, received her first dose of the vaccine on Wednesday.

Plummer was among the 49 residents and 50 employees at the Life Care Center of Nashoba Valley, a nursing home in Littleton, Massachusetts, to do so.

The Life Care Center of Nashoba Valley suffered from the coronavirus outbreak in the spring but “was free of COVID-19 by the end of May,” the facility said.

ABC News’ Arielle Mitropoulos contributed to this report.