By Daniel E. Slotnik

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It’s Friday.

Weather: Sunny, with a high in the mid-40s. It’ll be a wet weekend, near 50 on Saturday and cooler on Sunday.

Alternate-side parking: Suspended today for Purim.

The number of New Yorkers testing positive for the coronavirus has declined precipitously since the peak of the holiday surge, but the state still has a long way to go.

New variants of the virus appear to be spreading in New York City, where the positive test rate has diminished only slowly and community transmission remains high, even as the state rolls back some restrictions imposed earlier in the pandemic.

“Everything seems so tenuous and fragile,” Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, an epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told my colleague Sharon Otterman.

[Variants threaten the city’s progress on the virus.]

Here’s what you need to know:

The new variants

A more contagious variant of the coronavirus, first discovered in Britain and called B.1.1.7, has been on the rise in New York since the first case was confirmed in the state in January.

Two groups of researchers found that another variant, B.1.526, is also spreading in the city and carries a mutation that may make vaccine less effective. Researchers also discovered cases of variants that emerged in South Africa and Brazil.

The vaccine rollout

As of early this week, New York City had partially or fully vaccinated about 1 million people.

But the distribution has been uneven across racial groups, with those hit hardest by the virus being vaccinated at lower rates. Also, about a quarter of the people who received the vaccine in the city live outside of it.

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