Coronavirus updates: 23-year-old college student dies from COVID-19

The mayors of five Florida cities -- Miami Beach, St. Petersburg, Sunrise, Miami Shores and Hialeah -- are begging Gov. Ron DeSantis to enact a statewide mask mandate. At a Wednesday news conference, they also asked DeSantis to allow local governments to make decisions for their communities in regards to social distancing, contact tracing and testing.

“Since the governor opened up the economy totally in late September and simultaneously prevented local governments from enforcing individual mask mandates, we have seen an enormous surge," Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber said. "Our state's primary economic engine is hospitality, and people will not travel here if they believe it's unsafe. In fact, I'm convinced in projecting our state as a place where people are not wearing masks and where the virus is allowed to spread unconstrained will only serve to discourage visitors.”

“We are asking the governor to lead," Gelber said.

"For whatever reason our governor has decided that he is going to follow the lead of our president and not listen to what the medical experts and what the health care experts are saying," added St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman. "We have got to have a state that follows the same rules and puts in place the same rules as some of the other states around the country."

Florida on Wednesday topped 900,000 total COVID-19 cases.

ABC News' Rachel Katz contributed to this report.

According to the COVID Tracking Project, 19 U.S. states hit a record number of current hospitalizations Tuesday: Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Six states -- Idaho, Maine, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wyoming -- reached a record number of new cases Tuesday. Four states -- Iowa, Kentucky, New Mexico and Wisconsin -- recorded a record number of deaths.

Daily cases have climbed each day over the last week in the U.S., reaching 154,266 on Tuesday, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

ABC News' Brian Hartman, Ben Bell, Soorin Kim and Arielle Mitropoulos contributed to this report.

New York City public schools will close for in-person learning Thursday because the city has reached its 3% positivity rate threshold, said Chancellor Richard Carranza.

All 300,000 students will learn remotely until further notice, he said.

"This is a temporary closure, and school buildings will reopen as soon as it is safe to do so," Carranza said.

According to state data, New York City’s seven-day rolling average positivity rate is 2.5%.

As of Monday, the schools had a positivity rate of 0.23% out of more than 140,000 students and staff tested.

vABC News' Aaron Katersky contributed to this report.

White House coronavirus task force member Adm. Brett Giroir said the U.S. is facing "the worst rate of rise in cases that we've seen."

"This is not crying wolf," he stressed in an interview on MSNBC.

Though "vaccines are around the corner," Giroir said, state and local officials must be "very rigorous" about limiting certain businesses, limiting crowds in indoor spaces and enforcing mask use.

"If we do not do that, we will lose tens of thousands of Americans by the time the vaccine is out and widely distributed," he said.

Giroir also urged Americans to remember that a negative test is not a "free pass" to forgo masks and social distancing over the holidays.

"That negative test today does not mean you're going to be negative tomorrow or the next day, and certainly not by Thanksgiving. And it is not a free pass to go without all the important measures that we want, particularly mask wearing, physical distancing and following all the recommendations that the CDC has for the holidays," Giroir said.

 ABC News' Brian Hartman contributed to this report.