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.

The United States’ first known cases of the South Africa variant of the novel coronavirus have been confirmed in two people in South Carolina, according to the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control.

"There is no known travel history and no connection between these two cases," the department said in a statement Thursday.

Both cases are among adults, one who is from the Lowcountry region and another who is from the Pee Dee region, according to the department.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it's aware of the cases and it "recommends that people avoid travel at this time."

The so-called B1351 variant, first identified in South Africa, has been detected in more than 30 countries, according to the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control.

"Experts agree that existing vaccines work to protect us from this variant, even if we don’t know precisely how effective they are," the department said. "At this time, there’s no evidence to suggest that the B.1.351 variant causes more severe illness."

During an interview Thursday on ABC's "Good Morning America," Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden and the nation's leading infectious disease expert, said the South Africa variant "troubles" him.

Fauci said lab experiments show the neutralizing antibodies induced by existing COVID-19 vaccines are "diminished by multifold" when tested against the B1351 variant

"It's still within the range of what you would predict to be protective," he said, "but I take no great comfort in that."

However, scientists are already working on vaccines that will specifically target the South Africa variant, according to Fauci.

"May not be necessary," he said, "but if it is we'll already be on the road to be able to give people a boost that directs against the South African isolate."