STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – Everybody’s looking for someone to blame.

How did we not see the deadly COVID-19 pandemic coming?

How come we weren’t better prepared?

Could lives have been saved?

Who’s fault is it?

Let’s be real: Back in February, none of us took the coronavirus threat seriously. None of us thought it was going to be a life-altering event for everybody on the planet.

We New Yorkers went about our daily lives, even though the news from overseas got grimmer and grimmer every day as the virus spread from China and enveloped Europe.

We all continued to do what we always do: We went to work and school. We went to bars and restaurants. We partied with friends and family members.

A lot of us spent March 1 on Forest Avenue, enjoying the Staten Island St. Patrick’s Parade.

Looking back, you couldn’t imagine a better setting for spreading coronavirus than a bar, restaurant or house party on St. Pat’s Parade day. Nobody wearing gloves or masks while serving food and drink. People talking in close quarters, hugging, kissing hello, shaking hands. People eating from the same buffet. People sharing bottles of booze.

We may look back at that day as the vector that helped the virus take root on Staten Island, just the way that New Orleans residents and visitors are probably second-guessing attending Mardi Gras parties and parades at the end of February. Just like everybody is second-guessing taking those cruises this winter and spring, or the way some people decided not to let a little coronavirus stand in the way of their long-planned vacations.

Because we’ve all seen these illnesses pop up across the globe, right? SARS. MERS. H1N1. Ebola. Marburg. Even West Nile disease, which had an impact right here on Staten Island. None of those pandemics did anything to change how we went about our daily lives.

Two weeks after the St. Pat’s Parade, schools were closed and most of us had begun working from home. Supermarket shelves began to empty.

Here’s where you can put at least some of the blame: China. It’s looking like a pretty good bet that the communist government there didn’t tell us the full story when COVID-19 exploded out of Wuhan at the end of last year.

Did they hide the true extent of the virus? Do they know more than they’re telling about how the illness originated? Are they still withholding information?

The truth is, you don’t know how bad something like this can get until it actually does get bad. Remember how Mayor Bill de Blasio agonized over closing the schools, a move that in retrospect seems like a no-brainer? Remember how he encouraged people to dine out in Chinatown a couple of weeks ago?

President Donald Trump was little better, even though he did close the border to visitors from China. Democrats called him xenophobic, but that move saved lives.

Still, Trump was slow to mobilize the full power of the government against the virus. Like the rest of us, he thought that this too shall pass. Few were calling for a full-court press back in January or February.

OK, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) rang the alarm bells early, but he was a chorus of one.

For many of us, the pandemic didn’t become real until that night in March when we heard that Tom Hanks and NBA players Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell had coronavirus. The NBA shut down its season a short time later, and all the other dominoes soon began to fall.

So forget blame. We all missed the boat to one extent or another.

What’s important is how we respond now. How we get the economy back on its feet once the pandemic subsides. And how we do the proper pandemic planning in the future.

Forget the blame game. It won’t save lives.