Coronavirus updates: State reports over 49,000 new cases, 468 new deaths

There were 180,477 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the United States on Monday, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

Monday's tally is less than the all-time high of 297,491 new cases, which the country logged on Jan. 2, Johns Hopkins data shows.

An additional 1,903 deaths from COVID-19 were also registered nationwide on Monday, down from a peak of 3,750 on Dec. 30, according to Johns Hopkins data.

COVID-19 data may be skewed due to possible lags in reporting over the holidays followed by a potentially very large backlog.

A total of 20,823,345 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 353,621 of them have died, according to Johns Hopkins data. 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.

A COVID-19 vaccine developed by England's University of Oxford and British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has been authorized for emergency use in Mexico.

Mexico's Federal Commission for the Protection against Sanitary Risks (COFEPRIS), a decentralized regulatory body of the country's health ministry, announced its decision to approve the shot in a statement Monday evening.

Mexican Secretary of Foreign Relations Marcelo Ebrard took to Twitter to praise the approval, calling it "very good news."

It's the second COVID-19 vaccine to be approved in the Latin American nation. Mexico authorized a vaccine developed by U.S. pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech for emergency use on Dec. 11, just before the United States did so as well.

Mexico has reported more than 1.4 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, including at least 127,757 deaths, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

Despite a backlog in data on COVID-19 cases and deaths over the holiday weekend, the United States still marked a record level of coronavirus-related hospitalizations, according to data collected by The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-run effort to track the U.S. outbreak.

The data shows there were 128,120 people hospitalized across the country on Monday.

The COVID Tracking Project warned that data on testing, cases and deaths has been affected by the holidays.

"Hospitalization data remains the most stable metric despite the reporting disruptions. The 7-day average is now over 125k," the group wrote on Twitter Monday.

The COVID Tracking Project also noted that the seven-day average for COVID-19 deaths is increasing in 30 U.S. states.

"We expect the daily death numbers to increase significantly once the reporting trends stabilize post-holidays, in part due to backlogs," the group tweeted.

Health officials in Los Angeles County gave a dire warning to residents on Monday, particularly to those who are protesting mask mandates and other coronavirus-related rules, saying the situation is bound to get worse in the coming weeks.

The county has reported a total of more than 800,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases, half of which were marked in December, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

About 7,697 people are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, and 10,850 deaths from the disease have been registered in the county, according to the health officials.

Dr. Barbara Ferrer, the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, warned that hospitalizations could rise to 9,500 in two weeks.

"We're likely to experience the worst conditions in January that we faced the entire pandemic and that's hard to imagine," Ferrer said at a press conference Monday.

Ferrer and other officials spoke out against recent anti-mask protests held in the county.

"This isn't just about you. The facts are the facts, and they are grounded in science," said Dr. Christina Ghaly, director for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Service.

"Wearing a mask is not a statement about how you feel about your own health and your invulnerability," she added. "It's primarily a statement about how committed you are to protecting the lives and the health of those around you."

-ABC News' Matthew Fuhrman and Abigail Shalawylo