A few days after my building grudgingly changed its posted risk level to “LOW,” I got on the elevator with a father and his grammar school children. All were masked. I pointed out the mask reprieve on the elevator wall. The father shrugged. His children still have to wear masks in school, he said. That was child abuse, I replied. Oh, they’re used to it, he said breezily — as if that were a good thing. His daughter was more attuned to the ironies of this moment. “We’ve gone, in like three days, from high risk to low risk,” she chortled.

Midtown employers, if they feel any civic duty toward New York, should be hailing workers back to the office. The absence of foot traffic and of store and restaurant patrons has enabled the takeover of the city’s ever-more squalid streets and subways by the criminal and the deranged. Yet the big Midtown firms are proceeding with exquisite caution, not wanting to alienate their young, petrified employees.