Treating the coronavirus
Treating the coronavirusiStock

The United States logged 9 million cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, just hours after reporting a single day record of 80,622 infections, an NBC News tally showed.

It was the first time the US crossed the 80,000-case threshold since the start of the pandemic and the third time in a week that a daily case record was broken, the data showed.

The 996 COVID-19 fatalities reported Wednesday raised the national death toll to near 230,000, which is the most in the world, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

This past week, the United States saw two consecutive days with a record high number of new daily COVID-19 cases.

On Saturday, 88,973 new infections were reported, substantially above the previous day's 79,963.

Amid the wait for a vaccine, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Sunday that experts will know by early December whether a potential coronavirus vaccine is safe and effective, but widespread availability will probably not happen until next year.

Speaking in an interview with the BBC, Fauci said, "We will know whether a vaccine is safe and effective by the end of November, beginning of December. The amount of doses that will be available in December will not certainly be enough to vaccinate everybody -- you'll have to wait several months into 2021."

He added that the vaccination of a "substantial proportion of the population" so there could be a "significant impact on the dynamics of the outbreak" may not be possible until the second or third quarter of 2021.