Coronavirus updates: US will soon have 'half a million' deaths, CDC says

A total of 965,000 workers in the United States filed jobless claims last week, the U.S. Department of Labor said Thursday, an increase of 181,000 from the prior week.

The Labor Department also said that more than 18 million people were still receiving some form of unemployment benefits through all government programs for the week ending Dec. 26. For the comparable week in 2019, that figure was just above 2 million.

The weekly unemployment tally has fallen since peaking at 6.9 million in March but still remains elevated by historical standards.

The pre-pandemic record for weekly unemployment filings was 695,000 in 1982.

That record has been broken every week since late March.

As of last month, the unemployment rate in the U.S. was 6.7%. It was 3.5% last February.

-ABC News’ Catherine Thorbecke contributed to this report

This week’s national ensemble forecast released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts that 16,200 to 29,600 more Americans will likely die from COVID-19 in the week ending Feb. 2.

The national ensemble estimates a total of 440,000 to 477,000 deaths from the disease will be reported nationwide by that date.

Nearly all U.S. metro areas with over 500,000 people are in "full resurgence" of COVID-19, the White House coronavirus task force said in its latest report, obtained by ABC News Wednesday.

In the report, dated Jan. 10, the task force said the fall/winter surge has had nearly twice the rate of rise in COVID-19 cases as the spring and summer surges.

Several states, including Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico and South Carolina, are also in "full pandemic resurgence," the report stated.

Only "aggressive mitigation" can "match a more aggressive virus," and Americans must take more precautions, "moving beyond what worked in the summer to more layered mitigation," the report stated.

The task force recommended uniform mask implementation and "strict physical distancing." Without that, "epidemics could quickly worsen as more transmissible variants spread and become predominant," it warned.

ABC News' Josh Margolin and Brian Hartman contributed to this report.

The United States registered an additional 4,022 deaths from COVID-19 on Wednesday, according to data collected by The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-run effort to track the U.S. outbreak.

That marks the second day in a row that the country's daily COVID-19 death toll crossed 4,000, and the third time since Jan. 7, according to The COVID Tracking Project.

The seven-day average of COVID-19 deaths is up by 10% or more in 26 U.S. states as of Wednesday, compared to the previous week, according to The COVID Tracking Project.

The U.S. also confirmed 219,090 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, while 130,383 people remained hospitalized with the disease, according to The COVID Tracking Project.