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

The director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday that the COVID-19 fatality rate on the 54-nation continent "is becoming very troubling," as it climbs higher than the global average.

John Nkengasong told reporters during a press conference that the death rate from COVID-19 in Africa, the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, is now 2.6% while the global rate is 2.2%.

Nkengasong said 20 African nations, including South Africa and Sudan, have COVID-19 fatality rates higher than the global average as the continent grapples with new, more contagious variants of the virus. More than 3.5 million people across Africa have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic and nearly 89,000 of them have died, according to the latest data from the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The African Union regional bloc has secured 670 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from various manufacturers. In addition, Africa is expecting around 600 million doses from the vaccine-sharing facility COVAX, which aims to start shipping nearly 90 million doses to the continent in February.

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.