COVID-19 updates: US has 1st day since November with fewer than 100K new cases

Another 779,000 workers lost their jobs and filed for unemployment insurance in the United States last week, the U.S. Department of Labor said Thursday, as the pandemic-induced economic crisis continues to upend the labor market. 

This is a decrease of some 33,000 compared to the previous week’s figure, though the latest tally remains highly elevated by historical standards. 

Moreover, the Labor Department said that some 17.8 million people were still claiming some form of unemployment benefits through all programs as of the week ending Jan. 16. For the comparable week last year, that figure hovered just above 2 million. 

Thursday’s jobless claims tally comes ahead of Friday’s highly-anticipated jobs report -- the first to be released since U.S. President Joe Biden took office. The report is expected to paint a more complete picture of the state of the U.S. labor market and the pace of the recovery.

ABC News’ Catherine Thorbecke contributed to this report.

Israel is now offering COVID-19 vaccines to anyone over the age of 16.

"From this morning, anyone over the age of 16 can get vaccinated," Israeli Health Minister Yuli Edelstein announced via Twitter on Thursday. "Take advantage of the opportunity that almost no country in the world has."

The Israeli government aims to vaccinate the country's entire population of 9 million people against COVID-19 by the end of March. So far, more than 3.3 million individuals have received their first dose of the vaccine, including over 1.9 million who have also gotten their second dose, according to Edelstein.

Israel has confirmed more than 672,000 cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, including just under 5,000 deaths, according to data complied by Johns Hopkins University.

The COVAX Facility has announced its plan to distribute more than 330 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to developing nations in the first half of 2021.

In an interim distribution forecast published Wednesday, the vaccine-sharing facility said distribution would cover an average of 3.3% of total populations of 145 countries taking part in the first rounds. The allocation includes 336 million doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine -- 240 million manufactured by the Serum Institute of India plus 96 million made by AstraZeneca -- as well as 1.2 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

The COVAX Facility, which is coordinated by the World Health Organization, Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, noted that the plan is "non-binding and may be subject to change," with allocations and distributions subject to a number of caveats, including WHO emergency-use approval for vaccines and countries' readiness.

“We will soon be able to start delivering life-saving vaccines globally, an outcome we know is essential if we are to have any chance of being able to beat this pandemic," Seth Berkley, chief executive of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, said at a press conference Wednesday.

An additional 3,912 fatalities from COVID-19 were registered in the United States on Wednesday, bringing the country's cumulative total over the 450,000 mark, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

Wednesday's tally is still less than the country's all-time high of 4,466 new deaths on Jan. 12, Johns Hopkins data shows.

There were also 121,469 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed nationwide on Wednesday, down from a peak of 300,282 newly confirmed infections on Jan. 2, according to Johns Hopkins data.

COVID-19 data may be skewed due to possible lags in reporting over the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend last month.

A total of 26,557,031 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 450,805 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, then reaching 200,000 on Nov. 27 before topping 300,000 on Jan. 2.

So far, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized two COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use -- one developed by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, and another developed by American biotechnology company Moderna and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. More than 33 million vaccine doses have been administered nationwide, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.