A new, more contagious variant of the novel coronavirus first identified in the United Kingdom has been detected in Alabama for the first time.

The Alabama Department of Public Health announced Wednesday that two cases of the variant were confirmed in Montgomery County residents and a third in a Jefferson County resident. Two of the patients are children under the age of 19.

"These are the first reported cases in Alabama of the variant which was first detected in the United Kingdom in late 2020," the department said in a statement. "This variant is associated with increased person-to-person transmission of COVID-19. ADPH is closely monitoring the emergence of this variant which has been detected in at least 24 other states."

The so-called B117 variant, which is believed to have emerged in England in September, has been detected in more than two dozen U.S. states.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now projects that the country will have recorded up to 514,000 COVID-19 deaths by Feb. 20.

The CDC on Wednesday published its latest national ensemble forecast, which predicts that the country's COVID-19 death rate will likely decrease over the next four weeks and that 13,500 to 25,000 new fatalities from the disease will likely be reported in the week ending Feb. 20. A total of 479,000 to 514,000 COVID-19 deaths are projected to be reported nationwide by this date.

Last week’s national ensemble forecast predicted there would be a total of 465,000 to 508,000 COVID-19 deaths reported nationwide by Feb. 13.

ABC News' Ahmad Hemingway contributed to this report.

The United States has detected at least 315 confirmed cases of the highly contagious variant of the novel coronavirus that first emerged in the United Kingdom, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

California and Florida are tied at 92 cases each for the U.S. state with the most confirmed cases of the so-called B117 variant, according to CDC data.

The variant was first identified in England in September and has since spread to dozens of other countries around the world.

ABC News' Ahmad Hemingway contributed to this report.

A COVID-19 vaccine advisory committee that gives recommendations on priority groups to Oregon's governor and public health officials will vote Thursday on whether to focus next on people of color, according to The Associated Press.

Others, such as people with chronic medical conditions, essential workers, refugees, inmates and people under 65 living in group settings, are also being considered as the next eligible group to receive COVID-19 vaccines in the state.

The committee is also deciding whether to focus on some combination of groups at higher risk from COVID-19, according to AP.

The coronavirus pandemic has disproportionately affected communities of color in the United States.

"It's about revealing the structural racism that remains hidden," Dr. Kelly Gonzales, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a health disparity expert on Oregon's COVID-19 advisory committee, told AP. "It influences the disparities we experienced before the pandemic and exacerbated the disparities we experienced during the pandemic."

The official commemoration of the 76th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation will be held online Wednesday due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and Memorial, which is located on the site of the Nazi concentration camp in Oswiecim, Poland, is closed for visitors until at least Jan. 31 under COVID-19 restrictions set by the Polish government.

"Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the commemoration will exceptionally not be held at the Memorial, but in the virtual space," Auschwitz Memorial spokesperson Pawel Sawicki said in a statement Tuesday evening. "The main theme of the 76th anniversary of the liberation will be the fate of children in Auschwitz."

The online events will include testimony from survivors as well as a guided virtual tour of the Auschwitz Memorial, "aimed at enhancing the educational value for visitors from around the globe," according to Sawicki.

Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau, was a complex of over 40 concentration and death camps run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland amid the Holocaust during World War II. It was the largest of the Nazi concentration camps and extermination centers. More than 1.1 million men, women and children lost their lives there, mainly Jews, according to information on the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum's website.

In January 1945, as Soviet Russia advanced deeper into Nazi-occupied Poland toward the end of the war, Nazi officers organized a forced evacuation of the Auschwitz prisoners. Almost 9,000 prisoners, most of whom were sick or suffering from exhaustion, were deemed unfit to join the death march to Germany. The Nazis intended to kill them all as part of attempts to destroy the evidence of their crimes at Auschwitz, but only managed to murder about 700 Jewish prisoners between the departure of the final evacuation column and the arrival of Soviet forces.

Soviet troops entered Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945, a day now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and liberated more than 7,000 survivors, according to the museum's website.