The rules affected several neighborhoods with large populations of Orthodox Jewish residents and sparked an immediate backlash in some areas when they were announced.

Here’s what changed on Wednesday

Mr. Cuomo provided new metrics for the color-coded boundaries.

For the most serious restrictions to be lifted, an area in a red zone — where the outbreak had been particularly bad — would generally have to remain under a virus positivity rate of 3 percent for 10 days, while the rate to leave the less-affected orange zones would need to be under 2 percent and the yellow zones under 1.5 percent.

The governor said the rules for each zone — in yellow zones, for example, schools were allowed to remain open and restaurants to operate both indoor and outdoor dining — would not change. He said that in some places, the benchmark would be slightly higher, as “in a more rural area, you come into contact with fewer people.”

For comparison, the state had an average positivity rate of 1.2 percent over the last week, far below most other parts of the country. The current seven-day citywide rate is 1.68 percent, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday.

[Read more about the lifting of some lockdown rules.]

The new changes should allow nonessential businesses in some parts of Brooklyn and Queens to reopen starting today, while thousands of children are set to be able to return to schools in those areas as soon as Monday.

Stringent lockdowns remain in the hardest-hit areas of Brooklyn, as well as in parts of Rockland and Orange Counties. Also, the Ozone Park neighborhood in Queens, along with Steuben and Chemung Counties on the Pennsylvania border, are under new restrictions.

Source: New York Times

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