US Daily Coronavirus Death Toll Exceeds Deaths from 9/11

That's more deaths than those suffered in the 9/11 attacks.

Doctors say the death toll will get worse. COVID-19 hospitalizations also just reached a new record high of more than 106,600, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

Vaccine advisers for the US Food and Drug Administration are meeting Thursday to discuss the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

If the FDA grants emergency use authorization in the coming days, the first Americans outside of clinical trials could start getting inoculated this month.

COVID-19 vaccines are a "really significant light at the end of the tunnel," Sebelius said, but in the coming months it's crucial that Americans stay vigilant and follow safety guidelines, like wearing face masks, social distancing and hunkering down in their social bubbles.

"We've got to take what we've learned in the last eight months and really put it into practice, so we don't continue to have this unthinkable death toll and disease toll," she said, CNN reported.

But the country will likely not see any meaningful impact until well into 2021 -- and that's if enough people get vaccinated, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"Let's say we get 75%, 80% of the population vaccinated. I believe if we do it efficiently enough over the second quarter of 2021, by the time we get to the end of the summer ... we may actually have enough herd immunity protecting our society that as we get to the end of 2021, we could approach very much, some degree of normality that is close to where we were before," Fauci said during a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health virtual event Wednesday.

One big challenge: reaching the US communities that are hesitant of the vaccine and skeptical about the science behind it.

"We want to make sure that the vaccines are actually administered, and we're afraid that won't happen," Paul Ostrowski, who is leading supply, production and distribution for Operation Warp Speed, told "Good Morning America" Wednesday.

"We must build a trust in American people," he said. "We just want to make sure that everybody gets this vaccine, because we've got to get our lives back."