COVID-19 hospitalizations are increasing in Quebec and Quebec Premier François Legault says the biggest challenge is staffing.

"To get through the next few weeks, we're going to need 1,000 more employees in hospitals and 1,500 more employees" at one of Quebec's long-term care facilities, Legault wrote on Facebook.

About 10% of adults in Quebec are unvaccinated, but they make up half of the COVID-19 ICU hospitalizations.

"This means that unvaccinated adults are nine times more likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated adults. This is a huge burden on our health network," he said. "This is why we are considering a payable health contribution for all adults who refuse, for non-medical reasons, to get vaccinated," he said.

"The amount has not been decided yet, but it will be a significant amount," he added.

-ABC News' Christine Theodorou

The vast majority of law enforcement deaths last year -- 301 out of a total 458 deaths -- were due to COVID-19, the second year in a row COVID-19 was the leading cause of line-of-duty deaths, according to a new report from the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund.

"Law enforcement officers nationwide continue to be exposed to the Covid-19 virus in the course of their daily assignments; therefore, the number of line-of-duty deaths is sadly ever-increasing," the report said.

The vaccination status of the 301 officers who died is not known.

The CDC says it plans to update its mask guidance to “best reflect the multiple options available to people and the different levels of protection they provide.”

The CDC did not say when its guidance will be updated. In the meantime, the CDC said in a statement, “any mask is better than no mask, and we encourage Americans to wear a well-fitting mask to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

Since the arrival of omicron, health experts have urged Americans to upgrade their cloth masks to an N95 or KN95 because the new variant is so highly transmissible. But these higher-grade masks are costly and hard to find.

Prior to omicron, CDC director Rochelle Walensky resisted suggesting N95 masks for the average American because the CDC didn’t want to discourage people from wearing any mask.

Dawn O’Connell, a top official at the Health and Human Services Department, said Tuesday that the Biden administration plans to increase production of N95s. There are already 737 million N95 masks in the strategic national stockpile available for medical workers.

-ABC News' Anne Flaherty

Forecast models used by the CDC suggests COVID-19-related deaths will significantly increase over the next four weeks.

The model forecasts that 22,000 more Americans could die from COVID-19 in just the next two weeks.

The CDC obtains these forecasts 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

The labs shouldering much of the nation's PCR COVID-19 testing are getting slammed with demand again during omicron's surge, and now they're grappling with a new challenge: their workforces are getting hit by the virus they've been tasked with tracking.

The American Clinical Laboratory Association, the national trade association representing some of the leading clinical labs responsible for COVID diagnostics, is warning that their members' workforce is strained as more workers call out sick.

"Labs are now facing a wave of new issues brought on by a fast-spreading variant that has not spared the laboratory care work force," an ACLA spokesperson told ABC News.

COVID-19 infections have increased laboratory staff sick leave -- a "significant factor in determining overall capacity" at an industry-wide level, the spokesperson said.

"We have been pressured to get our capacity where we believe it can be because of the labor problems we see," Quest Diagnostics CEO Steve Rusckowski said Wednesday at the JPM Healthcare Conference. "Some of this is just getting the labor to do our work, but secondly, is because of callouts because of the virus have been considerable over the last two weeks."

-ABC News' Sasha Pezenik