South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has accused wealthy countries of "hoarding" excess doses of COVID-19 vaccines that they had ordered but did not immediately need.

Without identifying specific countries, Ramaphosa asserted that rich nations had "acquired large doses of vaccines" -- some "up to four times what their population needs" -- with the aim of "hoarding" them and "to the exclusion of other countries in the world that most need this." He said ending the global pandemic "will require greater collaboration on the rollout of vaccines, ensuring that no country is left behind in this effort."

"We need those who have hoarded the vaccines to release the vaccines so that other countries can have them," Ramaphosa told a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum on Tuesday. "We are all not safe if some countries are vaccinating their people and other countries are not."

Ramaphosa's comments come as African nations grapple with a rising number of COVID-19 infections. South Africa accounts for nearly half of the continent's confirmed cases and deaths from the disease, according to the latest data from the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Ramaphosa chairs the African Union, which secured a provisional 270 million COVID-19 vaccine doses from manufacturers last week for its 55 member states across the continent. Ramaphosa said those doses will supplement the 600 million to be acquired from the COVAX Facility, a global initiative co-led by the World Health Organization to ensure rapid and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines for all countries regardless of income.

Having Joe Biden in the Oval Office versus Donald Trump is a "complete game-changer" for the country's COVID-19 response, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said.

"Two ways: obsession with this, knowing that public health creates economic health, and a consistent national strategy as opposed to a patchwork quilt. It's a complete game-changer over the past six days," Murphy, a Democrat, told ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos in an interview Tuesday on "Good Morning America."

Murphy said his state, like many others, desperately needs more doses of COVID-19 vaccines

"We need more doses," he said. "The Biden administration knows that, they've entered into what I think is an empty cupboard and they're frantically, I know, obsessed with building that supply back."

New Jersey has confirmed more than 666,000 cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, including at least 20,972 deaths. The Garden State has administered 551,209 doses of COVID-19 vaccines as of Tuesday morning, according to real-time data collected by Johns Hopkins University.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has delivered almost double the amount of vaccine doses to New Jersey than have been administered there. Murphy said part of the issue is that a federally-run long-term care channel is putting aside doses in advance of visits to nursing homes and other care facilities.

"So it looks like they're not getting used. Those are actually earmarked for distribution over the next week or two," he said. "And then on the state side, ... we're not throwing any doses away, I promise you that. ... We are putting as many shots in the arms as possible."

In order for New Jersey to meet the goal of vaccinating 70% of its population within six months, Murphy said the state needs two or three times the weekly dosage of COVID-19 vaccines that they're currently getting.

"I'm confident we'll get there," he said. "It's not going to be as early as we had hoped, but I'm confident we're going to get there and I think by the time we turn to the summer, we're in a whole different place."

Biden aims to reopen all elementary schools and bring students for in-person learning within the first 100 days of his presidency, but Murphy said New Jersey will likely have to do a mix of remote and in-person learning.

"I'm not sure we can do it all in, fully in-person," he said. "I think the game-changer will be whether or not we can get the vaccinations for our educators."

There were 147,254 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the United States on Monday, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

Monday's case count is far less than the country's all-time high of 298,031 newly confirmed infections on Jan. 2, Johns Hopkins data shows.

An additional 1,758 fatalities from COVID-19 were registered nationwide on Monday, down from a peak of 4,462 new deaths on Jan. 12, according to Johns Hopkins data.

COVID-19 data may be skewed due to possible lags in reporting over the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend.

A total of 25,297,072 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 421,129 have died, according to Johns Hopkins data. 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 over the summer.

The numbers lingered around 40,000 to 50,000 from mid-August through early October before surging again to record levels, crossing 100,000 for the first time on Nov. 4, then reaching 200,000 on Nov. 27 before nearing 300,000 on Jan. 2.

So far, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized two COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use -- one developed by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, and another developed by American biotechnology company Moderna and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

COVID-19 hospitalizations in the United States continue to show a downward trend, according to The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-run effort to track the U.S. outbreak.

There are 109,936 people currently hospitalized with the disease nationwide, the group said.

Meanwhile, 45 U.S. states saw their seven-day average for COVID-19 hospitalizations drop by at least 10%, the group said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, opened up about his experience working with former U.S. President Donald Trump in an interview with The New York Times that was published Sunday.

When COVID-19 began to rapidly spread in the northeastern part of the country last year, particularly in New York City, Fauci said Trump had "almost a reflex response" to try to "minimize" the situation.

"I would try to express the gravity of the situation, and the response of the president was always leaning toward, 'Well, it's not that bad, right?' And I would say, 'Yes, it is that bad,'" Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the newspaper. "It was almost a reflex response, trying to coax you to minimize it. Not saying, 'I want you to minimize it,' but, 'Oh, really, was it that bad?'"

Fauci, who was a key member of the Trump administration's coronavirus task force, said another thing that made him "really concerned" was the former president taking input from non-experts on unproven methods to treat COVID-19, like hydroxychloroquine.

"It was clear that he was getting input from people who were calling him up, I don’t know who, people he knew from business, saying, 'Hey, I heard about this drug, isn't it great?' or, 'Boy, this convalescent plasma is really phenomenal,'" Fauci told the newspaper. "And I would try to, you know, calmly explain that you find out if something works by doing an appropriate clinical trial; you get the information, you give it a peer review. And he’d say, 'Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this stuff really works.'"

"He would take just as seriously their opinion -- based on no data, just anecdote -- that something might really be important," Fauci added. "That’s when my anxiety started to escalate."

When the leadership of the White House coronavirus task force changed hands last February, with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence coordinating the government's response and Trump at the podium taking questions from reporters during the press briefings, Fauci said it went from "the standard kind of scientifically based, public-health-based meetings" to "the anecdotally driven situations, the minimization, the president surrounding himself with people saying things that didn’t make any scientific sense."

"Then I started getting anxious that this was not going in the right direction," he told the newspaper. "We would say things like: 'This is an outbreak. Infectious diseases run their own course unless one does something to intervene.' And then he would get up and start talking about, 'It’s going to go away, it’s magical, it’s going to disappear.'"

That's when Fauci said it became clear to him that he needed to speak up, even if it meant contradicting the president.

"He would say something that clearly was not correct, and then a reporter would say, 'Well, let’s hear from Dr. Fauci.' I would have to get up and say, 'No, I’m sorry, I do not think that is the case,' he told the newspaper. "It isn’t like I took any pleasure in contradicting the president of the United States. I have a great deal of respect for the office. But I made a decision that I just had to. Otherwise I would be compromising my own integrity, and be giving a false message to the world. If I didn’t speak up, it would be almost tacit approval that what he was saying was OK."

This upset Trump's "inner circle," Fauci said.

"That’s when we started getting into things I felt were unfortunate and somewhat nefarious -- namely, allowing Peter Navarro to write an editorial in USA Today saying I’m wrong on most of the things I say," he told the newspaper. "Or to have the White House press office send out a detailed list of things I said that turned out to be not true -- all of which were nonsense because they were all true. The very press office that was making decisions as to whether I can go on a TV show or talk to you."

Fauci said there were a couple times where Trump even called him personally to say, "Hey, why aren’t you more positive? You’ve got to take a positive attitude. Why are you so negativistic? Be more positive."

Fauci said he and his family have received death threats, beginning last March, and that his wife once suggested he consider quitting.

"But I felt that if I stepped down, that would leave a void. Someone’s got to not be afraid to speak out the truth," he told the newspaper. "Even if I wasn’t very effective in changing everybody's minds, the idea that they knew that nonsense could not be spouted without my pushing back on it, I felt was important. I think in the big picture, I felt it would be better for the country and better for the cause for me to stay, as opposed to walk away."