The New York City Fire Department announced Sunday that 61-year-old Joseph Ferrugia is its first active firefighter to have died of COVID-19.

He is the 13th member of the FDNY to die of coronavirus.

“This horrific illness has taken far too many lives, and now it has killed a man who bravely served New Yorkers for three decades," Fire Commissioner Daniel A. Nigro said in a statement Sunday. "He ran toward danger his entire career, searching for those trapped by flames and doing all he could to save them. Our entire Department mourns his loss.”

Ferrugia joined FDNY in 1990 and was a World Trade Center first responder, the department said.

FDNY said he is survived by his three adult children and three siblings.

Chicago Public Schools pushed back the return of in-person classes for kindergarten through eighth-grade students by one day as negotiations continue between the city and the Chicago Teachers Union.

While the district and union leadership agree on some items of contention in principle, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said at a press conference Sunday that the union has refused to put those agreements in writing and instead has added more items to the negotiating table that are not related to the public safety issues associated to reopening some classrooms during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Just minutes before Lightfoot was expected to appear in a presser Sunday, CTU sent a series of tweets that hinted there was not going to be a deal just yet.

The mayor said she still expects CPS teachers to show up to their classrooms despite the dispute. Last week she said that if they do not, she would be forced to take further action, but did not specify what that action would be.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its latest update Sunday on the country's coronavirus vaccine rollout.

There have been close to 50 million doses distributed around the country, according to the agency's online tracker. Of those doses, 31 million, roughly 62%, have been administered, according to the CDC.

About 25 million people have received their first dose and 5.6 million have received two doses, the CDC said.

A city on Florida’s panhandle put on its Mardi Gras parade as planned, despite its high positivity rate.

Prior to the parade on Saturday, Milton Mayor Heather Lindsay advised residents to take their temperature before attending the event and for everyone who attends the party after the parade and participates in the kid’s zone to wear a mask.

"I would love to focus only on the fun and pageantry of it all because I love Mardi Gras, but we must accept life on life's terms," Lindsay wrote. "Presently we are in the midst of a widespread outbreak of a virus that is not just the flu."

The city currently has a positivity rate of 18%, "well above" the state average of 6.62%, Lindsay wrote. Households affected in Milton reduced from a high of 102 to 90 this week, but the local positivity rate has been as high as 28% and "never lower" than 16%, she added. The population in Milton is about 10,000.

It is unclear how many people attended the event.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, opened up about his experience working with former U.S. President Donald Trump in an interview with The New York Times that was published Sunday.

When COVID-19 began to rapidly spread in the northeastern part of the country last year, particularly in New York City, Fauci said Trump had "almost a reflex response" to try to "minimize" the situation.

"I would try to express the gravity of the situation, and the response of the president was always leaning toward, 'Well, it's not that bad, right?' And I would say, 'Yes, it is that bad,'" Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the newspaper. "It was almost a reflex response, trying to coax you to minimize it. Not saying, 'I want you to minimize it,' but, 'Oh, really, was it that bad?'"

Fauci, who was a key member of the Trump administration's coronavirus task force, said another thing that made him "really concerned" was the former president taking input from non-experts on unproven methods to treat COVID-19, like hydroxychloroquine.

"It was clear that he was getting input from people who were calling him up, I don’t know who, people he knew from business, saying, 'Hey, I heard about this drug, isn't it great?' or, 'Boy, this convalescent plasma is really phenomenal,'" Fauci told the newspaper. "And I would try to, you know, calmly explain that you find out if something works by doing an appropriate clinical trial; you get the information, you give it a peer review. And he’d say, 'Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this stuff really works.'"

"He would take just as seriously their opinion -- based on no data, just anecdote -- that something might really be important," Fauci added. "That’s when my anxiety started to escalate."

When the leadership of the White House coronavirus task force changed hands last February, with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence coordinating the government's response and Trump at the podium taking questions from reporters during the press briefings, Fauci said it went from "the standard kind of scientifically based, public-health-based meetings" to "the anecdotally driven situations, the minimization, the president surrounding himself with people saying things that didn’t make any scientific sense."

"Then I started getting anxious that this was not going in the right direction," he told the newspaper. "We would say things like: 'This is an outbreak. Infectious diseases run their own course unless one does something to intervene.' And then he would get up and start talking about, 'It’s going to go away, it’s magical, it’s going to disappear.'"

That's when Fauci said it became clear to him that he needed to speak up, even if it meant contradicting the president.

"He would say something that clearly was not correct, and then a reporter would say, 'Well, let’s hear from Dr. Fauci.' I would have to get up and say, 'No, I’m sorry, I do not think that is the case,' he told the newspaper. "It isn’t like I took any pleasure in contradicting the president of the United States. I have a great deal of respect for the office. But I made a decision that I just had to. Otherwise I would be compromising my own integrity, and be giving a false message to the world. If I didn’t speak up, it would be almost tacit approval that what he was saying was OK."

This upset Trump's "inner circle," Fauci said.

"That’s when we started getting into things I felt were unfortunate and somewhat nefarious -- namely, allowing Peter Navarro to write an editorial in USA Today saying I’m wrong on most of the things I say," he told the newspaper. "Or to have the White House press office send out a detailed list of things I said that turned out to be not true -- all of which were nonsense because they were all true. The very press office that was making decisions as to whether I can go on a TV show or talk to you."

Fauci said there were a couple times where Trump even called him personally to say, "Hey, why aren’t you more positive? You’ve got to take a positive attitude. Why are you so negativistic? Be more positive."

Fauci said he and his family have received death threats, beginning last March, and that his wife once suggested he consider quitting.

"But I felt that if I stepped down, that would leave a void. Someone’s got to not be afraid to speak out the truth," he told the newspaper. "Even if I wasn’t very effective in changing everybody's minds, the idea that they knew that nonsense could not be spouted without my pushing back on it, I felt was important. I think in the big picture, I felt it would be better for the country and better for the cause for me to stay, as opposed to walk away."