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

Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway have joined the growing list of European countries that have said they won't recommend older age groups receive the COVID-19 vaccine developed by England's University of Oxford and British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca until more data from clinical trials becomes available.

The Danish Health Authority said Thursday that it will recommend the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine to people under the age of 65 who are not at risk of serious illness from COVID-19. The drugs regulator citied a lack of documentation as to the vaccine's efficacy in older age groups.

The Norwegian Institute of Public Health said it will also limit use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine to those under 65 because there had been few participants older than that in the trial conducted by AstraZeneca.

Meanwhile, the Dutch Health Council said the efficacy of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in those over 55 "cannot yet be calculated because they participated only to a limited extent in the vaccine studies."

Belgium, France and Germany have made similar moves recently, while Switzerland went a step further and declined to authorize the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine for any age group, citing insufficient data.

The number of COVID-19 vaccine doses delivered across the United States over the past week dropped 22.5%, but the amount of doses administered increased 13.5%, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The country has also seen a three-week downward trend in new COVID-19 cases, resulting in a 44% decline in the seven-day daily average since the peak on Jan. 8, the report said.

Still, the current number of daily cases remains over twice as high as the numbers during prior peaks.

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

There are currently 91,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States -- the lowest since Nov. 28, which was two days after Thanksgiving, according to an ABC News analysis of data compiled by The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-run effort to track the U.S. outbreak.

COVID-19 hospitalizations have declined across the country by nearly 30% over the last three weeks.

In the span of three weeks, the national seven-day average of daily COVID-19 cases has declined by 45.6% -- the steepest and most consistent non-holiday-related drop in cases the U.S. has seen since the summer.

ABC News’ Arielle Mitropoulos contributed to this report.

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.