January 31 coronavirus news

The United States reported 136,252 new Covid-19 cases and 2,640 additional related deaths on Saturday, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

That raises the national total to at least 26,069,046 cases and 439,439 deaths since the pandemic began.

The totals include cases from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and other U.S. territories, as well as repatriated cases.

At least 49,932,850 vaccine doses have been distributed so far, and at least 29,577,902 doses of vaccine have been administered, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

See CNN's live tracker of cases here.

For the first time in nearly two months, current Covid-19 hospitalizations in the United States have fallen below 100,000, according to data from The Covid Tracking Project. 

On Saturday, the US reported 97,561 Covid-19 hospitalizations, the data shows.

Before then, the last time the US had fewer than 100,000 current hospitalizations was December 1, 2020 -- 60 days ago.

On December 1, the United States had a 7-day average of roughly 163,000 new cases and 1,540 reported deaths per day, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Right now, the US has roughly the same new case average, but sees more than double the average daily deaths, with over 3,000 a day.  

Hospitalizations have been dropping consistently since the start of the year, according to CTP. This past week was the first week since November 5 that no state has reached a new record high for current hospitalizations, according to CTP. 

Maryland state health officials have confirmed a case of a more contagious coronavirus strain first identified in South Africa, according to a press release from Gov. Larry Hogan’s office.

The announcement comes after South Carolina identified the first known case of the Covid-19 variant in the US earlier this week.

The Maryland case “involves an adult living in the Baltimore metro region," Hogan's office said.

A team of World Health Organization (WHO) investigators examining the origins of the coronavirus pandemic visited the Baishazhou Wholesale Market in Wuhan on Sunday, said Dr. Hung Nguyen-Viet, a member of the group.

The team of 13 WHO experts were released from their 14-day quarantine on Thursday and have begun their investigations into the virus origins. The team visited the cold storage area of the market Sunday, and talked with market management about how to treat and test imported food, said Nguyen-Viet.

"In the afternoon we will visit Huanan Seafood Market," he told CNN. "I hope we will talk with market management officials and ask questions about (the outbreak's) history. We are keenly interested to go there as this is likely where the first linked cases emerged. We know there were more varieties of food there."

The investigation comes a year after the Chinese city of Wuhan went into lockdown from the pandemic -- but some experts have expressed skepticism over just how much the team will be able to uncover.

An earlier report, published in February 2020 by a WHO team in China, found that "key knowledge gaps remain" about the virus. The report endorsed previous findings that the virus appeared to have originated in animals, with the likely first outbreak at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan.

Germany is already ordering coronavirus vaccines for 2022, said German Health Minister Jens Spahn on Saturday.

At the event, Spahn acknowledged that Germany could be doing better in its distributing of the vaccine, but said the country is well on the way to immunizing the population. 

Spahn also said that under the current response plan, some of Germany's lockdown restrictions could be lifted by summer, though it will depend on what experts say.

There have been at least 26,012,880 total cases of coronavirus in the United States and at least 438,239 people have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic began, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. 

From the first case of Covid-19 in the US in January 2020, it took the nation 311 days, until Nov. 27, 2020, to reach 13 million total Covid-19 cases.

The US took just 64 days to reach the second 13 million cases.