Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee sent a letter to the White House Monday requesting staffing resources to help the state's overwhelmed hospitals.

"Once the Delta variant hit Washington state, COVID-19 hospitalizations skyrocketed. From mid-July to late August, we saw hospitalizations double about every two weeks," Inslee wrote. "The hospitals have surged to increase staffed beds and stretch staff and have canceled most non-urgent procedures, but are still over capacity across the state."

"While there are hopeful signs that the current wave of infection is peaking, and some states are beginning to see declines, we have not yet seen that effect here," the governor said.

Washington state had already asked for 1,200 federal government staffers and is now "requesting the deployment of Department of Defense medical personnel to assist with the current hospital crisis," Inslee said.

A second dose of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine given two months after the first leads to stronger protection, the company said Tuesday.

Compared to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, Johnson & Johnson's single-shot vaccine always had slightly lower efficacy. Peak efficacy from the two-shot Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was 95% and 94%, respectively, against symptomatic illness, compared to 72% with J&J's one shot. But two Johnson & Johnson shots, given two months apart, resulted in a similarly high effectiveness level: 94% protection against any symptomatic infection in the U.S. and 100% against severe disease.

J&J chief scientific officer Dr. Paul Stoffels said the single-shot vaccine still provides "strong and long-lasting protection" while also being "easy to use, distribute and administer."

"At the same time," Stoffels said, "we now have generated evidence that a booster shot further increases protection against COVID-19 and is expected to extend the duration of protection significantly."

-ABC News' Sony Salzman

The U.S. reported more than 225,000 child COVID-19 cases, marking the fourth consecutive week with over 200,000 new pediatric cases reported, according to a newly released weekly report from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association.

In the last five weeks alone, the country has reported more than 1.1 million pediatric cases, according to the organizations.

"The weekly figure is now about 26 times higher than it was in June, when just 8,400 pediatric cases were reported over the span of a week," the organizations wrote in their report.

The South accounted for about half --110,000-- of last week's pediatric cases, according to the report.

The organizations added that more than 2,200 children are hospitalized with a confirmed or suspected COVID-19 infection.

-ABC News' Arielle Mitropoulos

The U.S. surpassed 675,000 coronavirus deaths Monday, according to Johns Hopkins University's Coronavirus Resource Center.

The 675,446 deaths since the pandemic began in March of 2020 now surpasses the deaths from the 1918 pandemic.

Although the seven-day average of new deaths is nowhere near the 3,600 deaths recorded in mid-January, the average has been increasing since mid-July, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The seven-day average of new deaths has gone from 191 on July 10 to 1,353 on Sept. 19, the CDC data showed.

The majority of recent deaths has been among unvaccinated Americans, according to the data.

The Florida Department of Health issued an emergency rule Wednesday that lets parents choose whether to quarantine their children if they are deemed a close contact of someone who tested positive for COVID-19.

In such cases, parents can let their children "attend school, school-sponsored activities, or be on school property, without restrictions or disparate treatment, so long as the student remains asymptomatic," the emergency rule stated.

The move is the state's latest to empower parents when it comes to coronavirus measures in schools. In July, Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order giving parents the choice of whether to send their kids to school with masks, setting off an intense back-and-forth between the state and districts that mandated masks in the weeks since.

DeSantis touted the new "symptoms-based approach" during a press briefing Wednesday.

"Quarantining healthy students is incredibly damaging to their educational advancement," he said. "It's also incredibly disruptive for families all throughout the state of Florida."

At least one superintendent in Florida has spoken out against the new quarantine rule.

"I find it ironic that the new state rule begins with the phrase 'Because of an increase in COVID-19 infections, largely due to the spread of the COVID-19 delta variant,'" Carlee Simon, superintendent of Alachua County Public Schools, said in a statement posted to Twitter Wednesday.

"In fact, this rule is likely to promote the spread of COVID-19 by preventing schools from implementing the common-sense masking and quarantine policies recommended by the vast majority of health care professionals, including those here in Alachua County," she added.

-ABC News' Will McDuffie