The mayor of San Francisco ordered new lockdowns and business restrictions across the Bay Area in the face of the Covid-19 surge, as political leaders nationwide ramp up pressure on Americans to stay home until vaccines can be distributed.

U.S. leaders urgently called on Americans to wear masks and threatened even more drastic stay-at-home orders after deaths from the coronavirus set a single-day record, with two people dying every minute.

If all things go well, the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine will receive EUA from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration around December 10 or within a few days after, and the Moderna vaccine will receive EUA around December 17 or within a few days after.

AstraZeneca is likely to run an additional global trial to assess the efficacy of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine using a lower dosage, the British drugmaker’s chief executive was quoted as saying amid questions over the results of a late-stage study.

North Dakota became the 35th U.S. state to require face coverings be worn in public, as governors across the country grapple with a surge in coronavirus infections that threatens to swamp their healthcare systems.

The likelihood that a coronavirus infection will prove fatal dropped by nearly a third since April due to improved treatment, researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) said.

Chicago’s mayor issued a month-long stay-at-home advisory, and Detroit’s public schools called a halt to in-person instruction to curb the spread of the coronavirus as more than a dozen U.S. states reported a doubling of new Covid-19 cases in the last two weeks.

U.S. coronavirus cases crossed the 9 million mark, rising by 1 million in two weeks as the world’s worst-affected country faces a resurgence in the pandemic just ahead of elections.

Although it’s increasingly likely that one of the Covid-19 vaccines being tested will be approved or receive Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) before the end of 2020, experts are increasingly warning that widespread distribution may take a much longer time.

U.S. deaths from the coronavirus will reach 410,000 by the end of 2020 and deaths could soar to 3,000 per day in December, the University of Washington’s health institute forecast.