An international team of 13 scientists researching the origins of COVID-19 arrived Thursday in Wuhan, China, where the novel coronavirus was first discovered, according to the World Health Organization.

"The experts will begin their work immediately during the 2 weeks quarantine protocol for international travelers," the WHO wrote on Twitter.

All team members had to be tested for COVID-19 again in Singapore before flying to China. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests were all negative, but two IgM antibody tests returned positive results. Those two scientists remain in Singapore as they are retested, according to the WHO.

A total of 965,000 workers in the United States filed jobless claims last week, the U.S. Department of Labor said Thursday, an increase of 181,000 from the prior week.

The Labor Department also said that more than 18 million people were still receiving some form of unemployment benefits through all government programs for the week ending Dec. 26. For the comparable week in 2019, that figure was just above 2 million.

The weekly unemployment tally has fallen since peaking at 6.9 million in March but still remains elevated by historical standards.

The pre-pandemic record for weekly unemployment filings was 695,000 in 1982.

That record has been broken every week since late March.

As of last month, the unemployment rate in the U.S. was 6.7%. It was 3.5% last February.

-ABC News’ Catherine Thorbecke contributed to this report

This week’s national ensemble forecast released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts that 16,200 to 29,600 more Americans will likely die from COVID-19 in the week ending Feb. 2.

The national ensemble estimates a total of 440,000 to 477,000 deaths from the disease will be reported nationwide by that date.

Nearly all U.S. metro areas with over 500,000 people are in "full resurgence" of COVID-19, the White House coronavirus task force said in its latest report, obtained by ABC News Wednesday.

In the report, dated Jan. 10, the task force said the fall/winter surge has had nearly twice the rate of rise in COVID-19 cases as the spring and summer surges.

Several states, including Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico and South Carolina, are also in "full pandemic resurgence," the report stated.

Only "aggressive mitigation" can "match a more aggressive virus," and Americans must take more precautions, "moving beyond what worked in the summer to more layered mitigation," the report stated.

The task force recommended uniform mask implementation and "strict physical distancing." Without that, "epidemics could quickly worsen as more transmissible variants spread and become predominant," it warned.

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

President-elect Joe Biden laid out a five-point vaccination plan Friday that he promised would turn the public's "frustration into motivation" and meet his goal of getting 100 million shots into Americans' arms within his first 100 days in office.

The plan includes working with states to open up more priority groups for vaccination, mobilizing a larger workforce to administer vaccines and working directly with independent and chain pharmacies to distribute them. Biden's administration also plans to set up 100 federally funded vaccination centers in school gyms, sports stadiums and mobile clinics to help reach communities that have been hit hard by the virus.

"Equity is central to our COVID response," Biden said.

Scientists in Biden's administration, like the surgeon general, will speak directly to the American people, he added, and pledged to be transparent about "both the good news and the bad" when it came COVID-19 progress. "You’re entitled to know," he said.