RUTHFULLY YOURS

What are we waiting for? The question can be posed in either a wild, irresponsible way — or a sane, measured way. In New York, our “pause” will continue until at least May 15, and New Yorkers are asking, in a measured, sane way: What exactly are we waiting for?

In the beginning, we had a goal: to flatten the curve. We were warned that COVID-19 would overtake our hospitals and cause a health-system collapse. We were to stay home to give our medical heroes a fighting chance.

So we did, and thanks to the strength of our system, it worked. The Javits Center never filled up; the USS Comfort is sailing away. Three weeks ago, Gov. Andrew Cuomo was vowing to seize ventilators from upstate hospitals and send them to Gotham. Last week, we were dispatching our ventilators out to other states.

We did our part; we flattened the curve. So why is there no move to loosen regulations?

In February and March, expert and elite opinion seemed to understand that ­patience with lockdowns would at some point wear thin. But not anymore. Last week, Cuomo used a graphic in his daily presentation that listed the lengths of various wars and previous pandemics. The 1910 cholera outbreak lasted a year. World War II lasted six years. And so on.

The message: We haven’t been living through this that long, and our ancestors had it far worse. But if we are looking at years of lockdown, we need to be informed of it, we need a debate — and we need a plan.

Otherwise, it isn’t relevant that the Vietnam War lasted eight years, and the governor has to stop shaming us for looking for a light at the end of this hell-tunnel.

It’s also becoming apparent that staying closed is some weird poke in the eye to President Trump. Hyper-polarization means that if the president wants to awaken the nation from its devastating economic coma, it must mean that he and his cornpone followers are wrong. Smart people — who tend to have lockdown-immune jobs in academe, government and media — must know better, and they have a license to mock and demean.

But it isn’t true, as they say, that those of us who want a roadmap to reopening play down the virus or minimize its deadliness. We lost a lot in New York. We’ve watched our friends, family and neighbors succumb to this horrible disease. We understand what’s at stake.

But there is life beyond COVID-19, too. There are pro-life concerns on both sides. The pause has meant people are skipping cancer screenings. The lines at food pantries are scarily long. Last week, Cuomo ­admitted that domestic violence is on the rise. “Very bad.” But, he added, it’s “not death.” Maybe not yet. But these costs are very real, and they have to be tallied.

No one sane is pushing to return to “normal.” Normal won’t be back for a long time, and no one expects it to. If restaurants, bars or movie theaters opened tomorrow, people still wouldn’t flock to them. We are walking around in masks and sanitizing our groceries. We get it — we’re far from normal. We just want to start on the road back. We want to know the road exists.

It’s less that we need to know when this ends than we need to know how it ends. Are we waiting for deaths to fall below a certain daily number? What is that number? Are we waiting for hospitalizations to evaporate? For better treatment? For a vaccine? Antibody tests? Herd immunity? New Yorkers are tough, we can handle the truth.

But this uncertainty can’t last, or people will decide to leap into irresponsibility. We need a plan, and we need it now.