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

The University of Maryland's head football coach, Michael Locksley, has tested positive for COVID-19, Maryland's athletics department announced.

This Saturday's game against Michigan State has been canceled and won't be rescheduled. 

Locksley, who tested positive Wednesday and is isolating at home, said in a statement, "I am feeling strong, with only minor symptoms."

"I will continue to lead this program virtually and our game preparations for Indiana [set for Nov. 28] will begin immediately," he said. "This virus is testing our players and coaches right now, but I have no doubt that we will emerge as a stronger unit for having gone through this together."

With over 11.5 million cases and more than 250,000 deaths in the U.S., the "flu doesn't even come close," Dr. Anthony Fauci told the USA Today editorial board.

Fauci said his "frustration" with those not taking the pandemic seriously "borders on pain."

"Either people don't want to look at the data or they look at the data and they say it's fake. No, it isn't fake," Fauci said. "This is a global issue. I tell the people who deny or think that this is nothing, do you mean that every single country in Europe is doing the same thing, is making things up? They're not."

"Get rid of these ridiculous conspiracy theories and realize this is a public health crisis," Fauci said. We don't want to shut down as a nation because of the psychological and economic consequences of that. But we at least have got to be consistent in doing some fundamental things, so that's what concerns me. We're in a vulnerable position."

ABC News' Brian Hartman contributed to this report.

The total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Africa has surpassed 2 million.

As of Thursday morning, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed 2,013,388 cases since the start of the pandemic, including 48,408 deaths. South Africa currently accounts for more than 37% of confirmed cases on the 54-nation continent and over 42% of the deaths.

The true number of COVID-19 infections across Africa is feared to be much higher, as testing and health care access remains a challenge in many areas. Nevertheless, the continent of 1.3 billion people has fared better than other regions amid the pandemic, possibly due swift actions taken early to curb transmission as well as decades of experience with emerging infectious diseases.

According to a weekly epidemiological report released Tuesday by the World Health Organization, the African region saw a 22% increase in new cases over the past seven days compared to the previous week, while death rates remained similar. South Africa, Kenya, Algeria and Ethiopia reported the largest number of new weekly cases in the region.

As the United States mourns the loss of a quarter of a million people to the coronavirus pandemic, the former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that the death toll could reach 300,000 by the end of the year.

"It is absolutely mind-numbing to think that we have lost that many people -- each individual representing a friend, a family member, someone whose life had value," Dr. Richard Besser, now the president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told ABC News' Robin Roberts in an interview Thursday on "Good Morning America."

"One of the things that's so true in public health is that it's much easier for people to grasp the meaning when two or three people die in an accident than it is to truly understand what it means to lose 250,000 people," he added. "I worry, Robin, that if we don't change what we're doing, we're going to be having a conversation before the end of the year about 300,000 people."

When pressed on that grim prediction, Besser replied, "We're losing more than a thousand people a day, and the numbers are rising."