Covid-19 Worldwide: Live Updates on Cases and Deaths

On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio confirmed that the city will ease more restrictions on Monday. As many as 300,000 workers are expected to get back to work as outdoor dining, in-store shopping and office work resumes, with limits, he said at his daily briefing. It came a day after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced the city was on track to move to the next phase then, if current trends held.

“Outdoor dining is the way forward,” he said.

The mayor said that restaurants, many who do not have available outdoor space but have been open for takeout, would be able to place seating on curbs and sidewalks adjacent to their restaurants, even if they had never had seating before. He also announced that in July, the city would allow restaurant seating on 43 miles of streets closed to vehicle traffic The mayor predicted that the expanded outdoor dining plan would save 5,000 of the city’s restaurants and 45,000 jobs.

New surges of the virus in states like Florida, Arizona and Texas, which reopened more, quickly suggest the perils of letting down the collective guard.

In that way, too, New York City has become a barometer, of a nation of pent-up souls eager for a change no matter what their governors or mayors think.

It is as if the city is rebuilding itself, not with scaffolding and steel, but with cheeseburgers eaten at outside tables and fathers hoisting toddlers over the locked gates of closed playgrounds. It is a city built on festive, furtive and sometimes troubling pushing of boundaries. A lot more social, a lot less distancing.

In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Heather Sumner, 32, repeated a phrase commonly heard these days: “We can’t stay inside forever.”

Here’s what else is going on in New York:

• The mayor again repeated concerns that the virus might have spread as massive protests over systemic racism and police brutality recently filled city streets. Still, he said that city and state officials had been encouraged by “the trend line” of test results and hospitalizations, which have stayed flat in recent weeks, and decided to allow the reopening to go forward.

• The mayor said that the city’s playgrounds, which have been shut since March, would also reopen on Monday. But team sports, like basketball, soccer and softball, will not be permitted in city parks.

• The New York City panel that sets rents for the roughly 2.3 million residents of rent-regulated apartments froze those rents for a year, delivering a slight reprieve to tenants struggling in the worst economy in decades. Separately, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said New York City, once the center of the U.S. outbreak, was “on track” to enter its next phase of reopening as soon as Monday if there is no resurgence of cases.