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

Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia all reported record COVID-19 hospitalizations Monday, according to an ABC News analysis of data from The COVID Tracking Project.

When hospitalizations rise, deaths tend to follow, according to health experts. With the spread of more contagious COVID-19 variants, more people will "end up dying from this virus," Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University's School of Public Health, warned during an interview with "Good Morning America" on Tuesday.

Even with delays in reporting because of the holidays, hundreds of thousands of Americans are still testing positive each day. Monday marked two consecutive months that the U.S. has recorded more than 100,000 new cases every day.

-ABC News' Arielle Mitropoulos contributed to this report.

The head coach for the Cleveland Browns, Kevin Stefanski, has tested positive for COVID-19, the Browns announced in a Twitter statement Tuesday.

The football team's contingency plan is to have special teams coordinator Mike Priefer serve as acting head coach. The news comes just before the Browns' first NFL playoff game in 18 years on Sunday.

In addition to Stefanski, two coaching staff members and two players tested positive. The team's facility is currently closed for contact tracing purposes.

-ABC News' Michael Kreisel contributed to this report.

As hospitals across Los Angeles County reach capacity, ambulance crews have been told not to transport patients with little chance of survival.

The Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency issued the order Monday with immediate effect, saying "adult patients in blunt traumatic and nontraumatic out-of-hospital cardiac arrest" shall not be brought to the hospital if they cannot be resuscitated in the field due to the "severe impact" of the coronavirus pandemic on the health care system. That includes victims of heart attacks, gunshot wounds, stabbings and car crashes.

Los Angeles County has the highest tally of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths of any county in the United States, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

Data posted by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health shows there were 7,697 people who remained hospitalized with COVID-19 on Monday.

Arizona currently has the highest rate of COVID-19 infections per capita of anywhere in the world, according to a graph created by 91-DIVOC, which used data collected by Johns Hopkins University.

91-DIVOC is an online data visualization project created by Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, a teaching associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The graph, which is updated daily with data collected by Johns Hopkins University, shows that the southwestern U.S. state has an average of 112.1 newly confirmed cases per 100,000 people a day over the past week.

Meanwhile, the Czech Republic has the highest infection rate of any country, with a seven-day average of 96.7 new cases per 100,000 people a day. The United States as a whole has a seven-day average of 65.4, the sixth highest of any country, the graph shows.

Arizona's Department of Health Services has reported more than 561,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, including over 9,000 deaths. The state has seen a surge in new cases over the past week, which would account for the per capita ranking, according to ABC Phoenix affiliate KNXV.