France will begin lifting its COVID-19 restrictions this week, President Emmanuel Macron announced.

"The peak of the second wave of the epidemic has passed," Macron said Tuesday during an address to the nation, but warned the virus remains "very present" in France.

The president outlined three stages of opening. Starting Saturday, all businesses can reopen until 9 p.m., and at-home services, such as hairdressers, can resume. Religious services up to 30 people will be permitted, and more outdoor activity will be allowed. Residents still need permission slips to leave their homes.

The country's lockdown could end by Dec. 15 if COVID-19 cases are below 5,000 per day, Macron said. At that stage, residents will no longer need permission slips to move about, including between regions, and can celebrate family holidays. Cinemas, theaters and museums will be able to reopen, and a nightly curfew will operate from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m.

By Jan. 20, if cases are below 5,000 per day, restaurants, bars, cafes and gyms can reopen, and the curfew will be reduced. High schools will also fully reopen for in-person learning, followed by universities 15 days later.

Authorities are working to make testing more efficient, with the goal of having test results within 24 hours by Jan. 20, Macron said.

The president also announced financial support for those affected by lockdowns; restaurants, bars, nightclubs and sports halls can receive 20% of their turnover for the year 2019, if it is more than the 10,000 euros, from the existing "solidarity fund."

ABC News' Ibtissem Guenfoud contributed to this report

Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine candidate could be distributed "soon after Dec. 10," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said during an Operation Warp Speed briefing Tuesday.

Pfizer applied for emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration last week, and a hearing date was set for Dec. 10 to discuss the vaccine's possible authorization.

"If all goes well, we could be distributing vaccines soon after Dec. 10," possibly within 24 hours of FDA authorization, Azar said.

Elderly care facilities and health care providers will be the first to be offered the vaccine, according to U.S. officials.

Officials addressed an increase in vaccine hesitancy amidst the race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and public health leaders are working on a campaign to educate the public on the need to be vaccinated and the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, Azar said.

“I will get myself vaccinated as soon as I will be allowed to be vaccinated, to demonstrate to the American people my complete confidence in the independence and integrity of the process and the quality of any vaccine that I would make available to the American people,” Azar later added.

ABC News' Arielle Mitropoulos contributed to this report

At least 26 U.S. states and the nation's capital have seen the seven-day average of their daily COVID-19 cases double since the beginning of the month, according to an ABC News analysis of trends across the country.

In addition to Washington D.C., those 26 states are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia and Wyoming.

The national monthly tally of cases also continues to increase rapidly. There have been at least 20 straight days where the country as a whole has confirmed more than 100,000 new cases in a 24-hour reporting period. Over 3.1 million cases have been confirmed so far in just the month of November, which would be roughly the equivalent to a theoretical scenario where the entire state of Utah had tested positive for COVID-19 in the last three weeks.

Meanwhile, the number of COVID-19 patients hospitalized across the United States has doubled in the past month, with 12 states reporting a record number of hospitalizations on Monday.

The United States is now averaging more than 1,500 new COVID-19 fatalities every day, a rate of more than one death reported per minute. The national seven-day average of daily deaths is also now twice as high as it was just a month ago.

The trends were all analyzed from data collected and published by the COVID Tracking Project over the past two weeks, using the linear regression trend line of the seven-day moving average.

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

Russia claims it's COVID-19 vaccine, called Sputnik V, is more than 95% effective in preventing the disease.

The Russian Ministry of Health's Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology released results Tuesday from the second interim data analysis of its ongoing Phase 3 clinical trials, which showed Sputnik V had a 91.4% efficacy rate 28 days after volunteers received the first dose and seven days after they received the second one.

Moreover, preliminary data obtained 42 days after the first dose -- 21 days after the second dose -- indicates the vaccine's efficacy rate is more than 95%, according to a press release from the Russian Direct Investment Fund, which is overseeing the vaccine's development.

The analysis was carried out among nearly 19,000 volunteers who received both the first and second doses of Sputnik V or placebo. The press release noted that some volunteers experienced short-term, minor adverse events such as pain at the injection point and flu-like symptoms, but that no unexpected adverse events were identified as part of the research and the safety of the vaccine is constantly being monitored.

After being developed by the state-run Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, Sputnik V was controversially registered by the health ministry in August before starting crucial Phase 3 trials, with Russia declaring itself the first in the world to register a COVID-19 vaccine. The latest results come just days after three other leading vaccine candidates from Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca/Oxford announced that data from their respective trials showed efficacy of up to or over 90%.

Russia has offered to share related technology from Sputnik V with U.K.-based pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca to help boost the efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine developed with England's University of Oxford. Like the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, Sputnik V is based on a modified adenovirus, a type of virus that causes the common cold, which is adapted to produce an immune response for COVID-19. However, Russia claims its vaccine is more effective because it uses different types of modified adenovirus in the first and second doses, rather than just one. The Eastern European country has also said it will sell the drug for cheaper than the leading Western vaccines, offering it for less than $10 a dose.

Russia's vaccine effort has faced criticism for its lack of transparency and hurried approval process. International researchers raised questions about results from early trials published in peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet that contained anomalies and did not include a detailed breakdown of the data.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly praised Sputnik V and said one of his daughters has already received it. But Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskvov, told reporters Tuesday that the vaccine has not yet been administered to the head of state because it would be inappropriate for him to participate in the trials "as a volunteer."

"The president can't use an uncertified vaccine," Peskov said.

ABC News' Alina Lobzina and Patrick Reevell contributed to this report.

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.