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

Enough COVID-19 vaccine doses have been secured to inoculate all U.S. Capitol Police personnel, according to Acting Chief Yogananda Pittman, who credited "efforts of the Congressional Leadership, especially House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Administration."

The federal police force has been hit hard by COVID-19 infections since the Jan. 6 siege at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C..

"The Department expects delivery of the vaccines to occur shortly, and is already working with the Office of Attending Physician on logistics to administer them to our employees as quickly and safely as possible," Pittman said in a statement Thursday.

ABC News’ Jack Date contributed to this report.

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.