Who’s on guard as COVID attacks again?

Ican’t believe I’m saying this, but I miss the daily threats and stern scoldings from New York’s self-appointed father figure, Andrew Cuomo, and his estranged co-parent, Bill de Blasio. I miss their dire warnings and urgent ultimatums. I even miss their petty squabbling over who got to implement which COVID closures where and what restrictions when. At least it showed they cared.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re still bickering constantly. Only now, instead of trying to one-up each other with warnings of stricter regulations and soonto-be unavoidable lockdowns, they’re warring over who is responsible for the city’s flat-footed vaccine rollout.

But vaccinations, even if administered in the timely and efficient manner we deserve, will not reduce infection rates for many months. In the meantime, New York City is seeing more than 5,000 new cases a day, on average, with some 3,100 people currently hospitalized. The city’s overall test positivity rate is hovering above 8%, the highest it’s been since April, and public health officials expect it will get worse, with the effects of holiday travel and indoor family gatherings, before it gets better.

And then there’s the U.K. variant, a more transmissible virus mutant that’s circulating here.

But as cases spike to numbers not seen since the height of the pandemic, Cuomo and de Blasio have gone conspicuously quiet on the “stop the spread, flatten the curve” front. After months of ominous threats and graphic warnings, our famous disciplinarians have shifted to bland and non-committal musings more akin to pithy motivational speeches than hard-nosed leadership. Even Cuomo’s much-touted micro-cluster shutdowns and de Blasio’s citywide school closures have evaporated into thin air, mere memories of a time when our government officials could be bothered to follow through on their tough-love threats.

It seems our leaders have abandoned us. If we had a Department of Citizen Protective Services, I would pick up the phone and report them for neglect.

Cuomo and de Blasio don’t agree on much, including how to tally the infection rate, but they both drew lines in the sand and are now completely ignoring them. The city’s tracking website still shows dotted lines we don’t want to cross — a 5% test positive rate and 550 cases a day — with our solid, real-time lines soaring far above them.

What are the consequences?

This fall, Cuomo created his tri-color Cluster Action Initiative, which delineated zones, each with its own level of lockdown. Ten days of a 3% or up positivity rate would trigger an orange zone designation, closing high-risk businesses such as gyms, barber shops and nail salons — not to mention public and private schools — and a red zone, activated at 4%, would result in a full lockdown.

If you follow the city’s count — a methodology public health experts favor — the five boroughs as a whole have been in the orange zone since mid-November and in the red zone since early December. Today, by the city’s count, 48 zip codes have test positive rates above 10%, with some spiking higher than 15%, and all businesses except indoor dining remain open throughout the city.

But as we blew past all the previously established thresholds, Cuomo quietly changed his metrics. Now, instead of a single, fairly straightforward number, he offers a snarled syllogism of hospitalization rates even seasoned experts are struggling to untangle. It’s true that experience with the virus has reduced hospital admissions and deaths, but that doesn’t mean high infection rates should be ignored. Thousands are still getting sick each day, and far too many are dying.

The single wide-scale restriction our governor belatedly enacted — that ban on indoor dining in New York City — is not even being properly enforced. The state imposed it, the city is expected to police it and yet thousands of restaurants have just set up shop in makeshift outdoor structures with less airflow than their now illegal indoor counterparts. The pizzeria next to me jams patrons inside a four-sided plexiglass hut day after day and no one seems to notice or care.

Why the shift from firm discipline to shrug-and-move-on government? I don’t know the answer, but I do know this: We need our leaders to be the grown-ups in the room, now more than ever.

As a parent, I know it’s hard to set limits and stick to them. But I also know that if I say I’m counting to three, I better be ready with consequences when I get there. As a daughter who has lost a parent to COVID, I also know the enormous pain this pandemic brings — and that we cannot simply give up and let the virus have its way.

Our government officials took an oath to protect us and it’s time they put their leader pants back on and do the hard thing.