The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a federal transportation mask mandate Friday night which will be effective starting Feb. 1.

The mandate states that people traveling within or out of the United States must wear face masks while on conveyances and at transportation hubs to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

This includes airplanes, ships, ferries, trains, subways, buses, taxis and ride-shares, as well as subway stations, airports and other transportation hubs.

Drivers, conductors, and other workers involved in the operation of conveyances must also wear masks at all times, the CDC says.

"Conveyance operators must also require all persons onboard to wear masks when boarding, disembarking, and for the duration of travel," the mandate states. "Operators of transportation hubs must require all persons to wear a mask when entering or on the premises of a transportation hub."

There have been more COVID-19 cases reported globally in the past two weeks than during the first six months of the pandemic, according to the World Health Organization.

Almost exactly a year ago, there were fewer than 100 confirmed cases of the virus outside of China, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted during a media briefing Friday. This week, the number of reported cases globally surpassed 100 million.

"Now, vaccines are giving us another window of opportunity to bring the pandemic under control. We must not squander it," Tedros said.

At the same time, Tedros warned that vaccine hoarding will be a "catastrophic moral failing" that will ultimately "keep the pandemic burning" and hinder economic recovery.

His comments come after the European Union publicly fought with AstraZeneca this week over how many doses it can expect of the drugmaker's COVID-19 vaccine. After regulators approved the vaccine Friday, the EU enacted an export restriction on doses produced in the bloc. WHO officials called the move "concerning" and part of a "worrying trend."

"Vaccine nationalism might serve short-term political goals, but it's ultimately short-sighted and self-defeating. We will not end the pandemic anywhere until we end it everywhere," Tedros said. "My message to governments is to vaccinate your health workers and older people, and share excess doses with COVAX, so other countries can do the same."

ABC News' Kirit Radia contributed to this report.

The CDC is extending its moratorium on housing evictions through March 31, citing the health threat it poses.

The order had been set to expire on Jan. 31.

“Keeping people in their homes and out of congregate settings -- like shelters -- is a key step in helping to stop the spread of COVID-19,” the CDC said in a statement.

ABC News’ Anne Flaherty contributed to this report.

At Friday’s White House press briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci said the United Kingdom variant will likely become more “dominant” in the U.S. toward the end of March or early April.

There are 379 confirmed cases across 29 states of the B117 strain of the coronavirus, according to CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

Fauci indicated that the evolving nature of the virus is something the medical community will have to continue dealing with going forward.

“Even though the long-range effect in the sense of severe disease is still handled reasonably well by the vaccines, this is a wake-up call to all of us, that we will be dealing, as the virus uses its devices to evade pressure, particularly immunological pressure, that we will continue to see the evolution of mutants,” he said.

Fauci also indicated that the fight to contain the new variants will impact the vaccine response.

“We, as a government, the companies, all of us that are in this together, will have to be nimble to be able to just adjust readily to make versions of the vaccine that actually are specifically directed towards whatever mutation is actually prevalent at any given time,” he said.

ABC News’ Matthew Vann contributed to this report.

There were 152,478 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in the United States on Wednesday, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

Wednesday's case count is far less than the country's all-time high of 300,282 newly confirmed infections on Jan. 2, Johns Hopkins data shows.

An additional 3,943 fatalities from COVID-19 were registered nationwide on Wednesday, down from a peak of 4,466 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 25,598,062 people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 429,195 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 topping 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. More than 24 million vaccine doses have been administered nationwide, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.