Mark Sokolich, the hyper-involved mayor of Fort Lee, was — in his words — “trying to be normal.”

It had been a difficult Thursday morning.

The news was exploding with the announcement from state health officials that a Fort Lee man was the first in New Jersey to have been diagnosed with the highly contagious and potentially fatal strain of coronavirus known as COVID-19.

Overnight, Sokolich assembled a communications task force — at one point with two dozen people manning ringing phones at the borough hall from callers asking if they should pull their kids out of school or cancel weekend religious services.

Bergen County Executive James Tedesco dropped by Sokolich’s office. TV crews showed up. Reporters buzzed his cellphone.

By noon, Sokolich needed some normalcy.

He strutted alone down the steps of Fort Lee’s borough hall, made a left, and headed down the sidewalk toward the central business district, his cellphone attached to his ear and his blue suit jacket flapping.

“I’m just walking out to get a pack of cigarettes,” he said.

This is what normal has been reduced to in these unhealthy coronavirus days — a quick drag on an unhealthy cigarette at lunch.

These are panicky times. Schools are shutting down for “full cleanings.” Hospital emergency wards are filling with coughing patients asking for a test for the COVID-19 virus. Kean University, in “an abundance of caution,” canceled all out-of-state travel during next week’s spring break for its baseball, softball, lacrosse and volleyball teams.

It’s March Madness — a new strain, anyway.

Some college administrators suggested whether it’s more healthy to hold the NCAA basketball tournament in empty arenas — without fans. Christian pastors are telling their flocks not to hold hands with strangers when they pray the Lord's Prayer during church services. Some schools are ordering students to stay home and participate in online classes.

The GYM in Englewood posted a sign the other day at the front desk, next to a container of “advanced” hand sanitizer the size of a milk bottle and instructions to “please stay home” if you are sick, to “count for 20 seconds” when you wash your hands and to clean exercise equipment with “disinfectant wipes.”

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And that’s just the start.

Store shelves have been stripped of surgical masks. Doctors are invited on TV talk shows to give instructions on how to properly cough into your elbow. Chinese restaurants say customers are staying away, fearing that the virus, which originated in Wuhan, China, might somehow find its way into a portion of Jersey-made Peking Duck.

Is this the “new normal”?

We’ve endured moments of crisis before, but nothing like this.

After the 9/11 attacks, people gathered together. They hugged strangers at memorial services and waved flags. They brought cookies to firehouses and police stations. Even Republicans and Democrats stopped shouting at each other — for a few months, anyway.

A similar sense of togetherness surged after Superstorm Sandy. Even grumpy Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican with dreams of the White House, bro-hugged the incumbent Democratic president, Barack Obama, during a visit to the Jersey Shore. And in flooded towns, from Moonachie to Mantoloking, volunteers showed up to help residents shovel sand out of their living rooms and carry water-logged sofas to the garbage pile.

Not now. The fear of a virus, invisible and with no predictable pathway of how it infects victims, has become a social, cultural and political contagion of its own.

Few volunteers flock to the homes of those who “self quarantine” because they just returned from an overseas trip. Republicans accuse Democrats of hoping for a pandemic so they can throw President Donald Trump out of the White House. Democrats blame Trump for spreading chaos. CNN is holding a televised “town hall” to discuss the virus. Some Fox News anchors say the media is exaggerating the dangers.

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Less than 24 hours after announcing that a 32-year-old Fort Lee man was the first case of COVID-19 in New Jersey, state health officials confirmed that a woman from Englewood had tested positive for the virus.

The announcements touched off near-frantic investigations by local officials. Who were the victims' friends? Where did they travel recently? Where did they work? What about their neighbors?

Sokolich said his team of police and health officials determined that the Fort Lee victim, a health care worker with apartments in Manhattan and Fort Lee, had no children or spouse. But not much else was known — certainly not enough to determine how the man picked up the virus.

In Englewood, Mayor Michael Wildes said local investigators were trying to trace how one of its residents came in contact with the virus.

Such unknowns have amplified fears, not just in Fort Lee and Englewood but in many other communities — and for good reason.

COVID-19 seems far more contagious than viruses that spread the flu or colds.

Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard epidemiologist and the director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, estimated that between 40 and 70% of the world’s roughly 5 billion adults will eventually get the virus. Not all will become sick enough to require hospitalization. Some might even feel like they have caught an ordinary cold.

But with a fatality rate estimated at nearly 3%, you can understand how fear might spread as researchers rush to develop a vaccine. Millions could die.

It hardly matters that the World Health Organization has tried to calm those fears with claims that, like some deadly flu strains, the COVID-19 virus can be “suppressed” with a variety of “strong measures” such as quarantines.

So far, the good news is that Americans have not been reduced to a panic-stricken blob– not yet anyway.

Baruch Fischhoff, a Carnegie Mellon University psychologist and former president of the Society of Risk Analysis, points out that the worst strains of panic behavior — “people running in the streets and abandoning normal behavior” — rarely occur. Fischhoff describes it as “the myth of panic.”

Put differently: Most people don’t behave crazily even in the face of an invisible virus.

What Fishhoff and other social psychologists expect is a lesser strain of panic that includes hoarding food and storing two-week supplies of fresh water in your basement.

This may be the new normal.

At the same time, however, normal life still seems — well — quite normal.

On a recent afternoon in Midtown Manhattan, crowds thronged sidewalks as they usually do. Only a handful wore surgical masks.

In Fort Lee, an Amazon truck pulled to the curb by the borough library to make a delivery. A few blocks away, two women walked by a bakery carrying dresses they just fetched from a dry cleaner.

Across town, the flags flapped in the wind by a monument to another crisis — "The American Crisis” essay written by Thomas Paine in 1776 when he accompanied panicked American soldiers who ran from their encampment on the Palisades in Fort Lee to escape British troops.

“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine wrote as he walked through Englewood, Teaneck and Hackensack with troops led by George Washington.

The Americans hustled the length of New Jersey and escaped into Pennsylvania, only to return and win battles a month later in Trenton and Princeton, which turned the tide of the American Revolution.

As he walked through Fort Lee on Thursday, Sokolich thought of yet another crisis — the Bridgegate traffic gridlock that consumed his tiny borough in 2013.

“People ask if this virus is as bad as Bridgegate,” Sokolich said.

He paused at the thought and smiled.

“Nah,” he said. “Bridgegate was 100 times worse.”

Mike Kelly is an award-winning columnist for NorthJersey.com. To get unlimited access to his insightful thoughts on how we live life in New Jersey, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: kellym@northjersey.com Twitter: @mikekellycolumn