If New York City ever had a moment not to panic, this is it.

Our streets are teeming with people headed to work, shoppers, restaurant- and show-goers, bikers, joggers and preening poodles in numbers we haven’t seen in more than two years.

But with citywide virus cases inching upward at a treacle pace, it didn’t take long for the “Can’t let our guard down” machine to start clanking into gear. Mayor Eric Adams extended the mask mandate for 2-to-4-year-olds; colleges have reinstituted mask rules; health officials warn that the city’s “yellow” (low) risk level will soon turn orange.

Now Adams himself has caught the bug. Let’s hope and pray it doesn’t dilute his longstanding view that the city has to get on with it and “we have to learn to live with COVID.” (He looked and sounded fine in Tuesday’s recorded message about the Brooklyn subway shooter, and he did a slew of remote TV and radio interviews afterward.)

What a disaster it would be for Adams to backtrack (as he’s done on other occasions). The city truly is back — mostly. Even office occupancy, which lags behind the return to stores, restaurants and theaters, continues to tick upward.

It reached 38.3% this week, per the widely watched Kastle Systems Back to Work Barometer, which measures hundreds of city office buildings.

If that’s lower than landlords want and need — and it certainly is — it beats the 23.6% physical occupancy Kastle tracked in mid-January. The trend seems inexorably upward, despite media-pumped fears about another big COVID wave.

The New York Times might prefer the pandemic to last forever. Nothing ever beat the bug to empower governmental micromanagement of business and the social order, to say nothing of individual lives.

The paper daily warns us of the risk. It dutifully parrots every doomsayer who reminds us, “We may be done with the virus, but the virus isn’t done with us.” The latest mouthpiece was city Comptroller Brad Lander, who tested positive last week.

But the health establishment and politicians who sound nostalgic for the three-month lockdown that brought the Big Apple to near-ruin in 2020 show cavalier disregard for the more enlightened pandemic perspective — that the severity of cases matters much, much more than numbers.

Many states, even some where transmission is rising, have sensibly ceased daily updates on case numbers. But not New York!
 
Even Dr. Doom himself, Anthony Fauci, advised on ABC’s “This Week” when the nation’s coronavirus cases peaked in January: “As you get further on and the infections become less severe, it is much more relevant to focus on the hospitalizations as opposed to the total number of cases.”

Well, what does such a focus show?

The city’s Department of Health says Omicron-driven cases were running around 600 a day in early March. They’ve since risen steadily to 1,981 new cases logged April 8.

Yet six weeks since the “wave” began, hospitalizations have actually dropped. Per the DOH, hospital cases that were in the low 40s per day in late February fell, for whatever reason, to the 20s by mid-March — where they have remained in April.

Yes, hospitalizations are a “lagging indicator.” But they don’t lag by two whole months.

Deaths that were mercifully low (below 15 per day) in early March are today mercifully even lower — below five a day over the past week. This in a city of 8.3 million people.

Only two deaths were reported citywide for April 8. Allowing that fatalities may not all be recorded for several days after, does anyone expect that the final figure for April 8, 2022, will approach the 771 deaths of April 8, 2020?

The reasons, of course, are widespread vaccination, which powerfully protects most people from the virus’ capacity to damage lungs, and a relatively weaker virus strain than the one that ravaged the unvaccinated millions in the pandemic’s horrific early months.

In most every way, our great city looks and feels more like its old self despite crime rates that are rising alarmingly. The apartments from which many fled two years ago are now so in demand that the talk is of a shortage rather than a glut.

This is no time for an uptick in COVID cases — many so mild that they wouldn’t have gotten me out of high-school gym class — to blunt our progress. Adams must remain steadfast in his vision to keep the city moving forward, no matter how much heat he takes from fear-stoking “experts.”