WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) -- U.S. top health officials on Sunday called on Americans who had traveled for Thanksgiving to get tested for COVID-19 so as to contain the pandemic.

"That may be, when you go back to where you've came from, if it's possible to quarantine yourself for a period of time or even get tested to make sure that you are not bringing infection back to another place, be it another home or another family," Anthony Fauci, the country's leading infectious disease expert told ABC.

"If you're young and you gathered, you need to be tested about five to 10 days later," White House coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx told CBS.

A total of 1,070,967 people were screened at airports on the day before Thanksgiving, the largest number since the pandemic broke out in March, according to the U.S. Transportation Security Administration.

To date, the United States has recorded more than 13.37 million COVID-19 cases with over 266,838 related deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.