COVID updates: Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin tests positive
He said he has mild symptoms and will be quarantining for five days.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has swept the globe, more than 5.4 million people have died from the disease worldwide, including over 825,000 Americans, according to real-time data compiled by Johns Hopkins University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering.
About 62% of the population in the United States is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Latest headlines:
UCLA pulls out of bowl game
UCLA said its football team has pulled out of Tuesday night's San Diego County Credit Union Holiday Bowl due to COVID-19.
UCLA was set to play North Carolina State.
-ABC News' Matt Fuhrman
Greece sees record single-day increase
Greece reported 21,657 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday -- a record 133% increase from the 9,284 new cases reported on Monday, according to government data.
Eighty-five percent of COVID-19 patients in Greece's hospitals are not vaccinated.
-ABC News' Christine Theodorou
US cases, hospitalizations, deaths expected to rise
Forecast models used by the CDC suggest cases, hospitalizations and deaths will rise over the next four weeks.
According to the models, the U.S. death toll could reach 862,900 by Jan. 22.
Nationally, estimates suggest between 8,700 and 20,800 Americans could be admitted to the hospital each day by Jan. 10.
These forecasts are from the COVID-19 Forecast Hub at UMass Amherst, where a team monitors and combines forecasting models from the nation’s top researchers. The team then creates an ensemble -- displayed like a hurricane forecast spaghetti plot -- usually with a wide cone of uncertainty.
-ABC News' Arielle Mitropoulos, Brian Hartman
Hugh Jackman tests positive, The Music Man cancels performances
Hugh Jackman, who has been starring in The Music Man on Broadway, tweeted that he tested positive for COVID-19 Tuesday morning.
"My symptoms are like a cold -- I have a scratchy throat and a bit of a runny nose," Jackman said in an Instagram video. "But I'm fine and I'm just going to do everything I can to get better ASAP. And as soon as I'm cleared, I'll be back on stage."
The Music Man tweeted that all performances are canceled through Jan. 1 and that Jackman will be back in the show on Jan. 6.
Omicron accounting for about 58.6% of new cases
Last week, the CDC reported that omicron had overtaken delta to become the dominant COVID-19 variant in the U.S. However, on Tuesday, the CDC revised its initial estimates to noticeably lower numbers of omicron cases.
Last Monday, the CDC said omicron was estimated to makeup more than 73.2% of new cases as of Dec. 18. Now, the CDC says just 22.5% of new U.S. cases were estimated to be omicron as of Dec. 18.
According to new data from this week, the CDC says omicron is now estimated to account for 58.6% of all new cases, officially making it the dominant strain in the U.S. In the New York and New Jersey region as well as the deep South, omicron is estimated to account for more than 85% of new cases.
A CDC spokeswoman said in a statement, "There was a wide predictive interval posted in last week’s chart, in part because of the speed at which omicron was increasing. We had more data come in from that timeframe and there was a reduced proportion of omicron. It’s important to note that we’re still seeing steady increase in the proportion of omicron."
ABC contributor Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital, said, "It may be possible that a large portion of their [the CDC's] sequencing data had come from labs that were specifically looking for s-gene samples, thus falsely elevating the percent omicron in samples."
-ABC News' Arielle Mitropoulos