American drugstore chain Rite Aid said it will offer COVID-19 vaccines at no cost.

In an email to customers on Tuesday, Rite Aid chief pharmacy officer Jocelyn Konrad said that through their partnership with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as an official COVID-19 vaccination program provider, "we are staged and ready to make this lifesaving vaccine available in all of the communities we serve when it becomes available to Rite Aid."

"This means you will be able to receive the vaccine from your neighborhood Rite Aid pharmacist, whom you know and trust," Konrad said. "Better yet, the COVID-19 vaccines will be available at no cost."

Rite Aid customers will be able to schedule an appointment to receive the vaccine once one is approved and becomes available in the United States, according to Konrad.

There were 172,935 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the United States on Tuesday, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

It's the 22nd straight day that the country has reported over 100,000 newly diagnosed infections. Tuesday's count is down from a peak of 196,004 new cases on Nov. 20.

An additional 2,146 fatalities from COVID-19 were also registered nationwide on Tuesday, the country's highest single-day death toll from the disease since May 6 but just under the all-time high of 2,609 new deaths on April 15.

A total of 12,597,330 people in the United States have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 259,962 of them have died, according to Johns Hopkins. The cases include people from all 50 U.S. states, Washington, D.C. and other U.S. territories as well as repatriated citizens.

Much of the country was under lockdown by the end of March as the first wave of pandemic hit. By May 20, all U.S. states had begun lifting stay-at-home orders and other restrictions put in place to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. The day-to-day increase in the country's cases then hovered around 20,000 for a couple of weeks before shooting back up and crossing 100,000 for the first time on Nov. 4.

There were 10,784 deaths recorded from Nov. 17 to 23, marking a 26.9% increase in new deaths compared with the previous week, according to an internal Health and Human Services memo obtained by ABC News Tuesday night.

New cases increased 12.2% during that time, and the national test-positivity rate dropped to 10.3% from 10.8%, the memo said.

Across the country, 27% of hospitals have more than 80% of their intensive care unit beds filled.

Maine, Pennsylvania and Texas saw unprecedented increases in COVID-19 cases, and hospitalizations in Pennsylvania surpassed their April peak, the memo noted.

ABC News' Josh Margolin contributed to this report

The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 set a new record for the 15th consecutive day on Tuesday, according to The COVID Tracking Project.

There were 88,080 people currently hospitalized, based on the tracker. The record-setting run began on Nov. 10 with 62,062 hospitalizations.

Hospitalizations are increasing "at an extremely fast rate" in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the tracker said.

The U.S. also saw more than 2,000 new COVID-19 deaths for the first time since early May, COVID Tracking Project data shows, with states reporting 2,028 fatalities on Tuesday.

The actual number of people infected with the novel coronavirus in the United States reached nearly 53 million at the end of September, according to a model developed by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The scientists estimated the cumulative incidence of COVID-19 in the U.S. population by taking the laboratory-confirmed case counts that were reported nationally and adjusting them for sources of under-detection based on testing practices in inpatient and outpatient settings. Preliminary estimates using the model found that 2.4 million hospitalizations, 44.8 million symptomatic illnesses and 52.9 million total infections may have occurred through Sept. 30.

"This indicates that approximately 84% of the U.S. population has not yet been infected and thus most of the country remains at risk, despite already high rates of hospitalization," the scientists wrote in a report published in the Nov. 25 issue of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

There were 6.9 million laboratory-confirmed cases of of domestically-acquired infections that were detected and reported nationally through Sept. 30. Since then, the CDC's tally has increased to nearly 12.5 million. Based on the model's ratio, the true estimated total would now be more than 95 million.