Rough as things still are, the metro area looks to be past the coronavirus peak without completely overwhelming hospitals, as happened so tragically in Italy. That’s tremendously good news.

Social distancing has flattened the curve, with daily new deaths seemingly leveled off or even dropping, and new COVID-19 hospitalizations also in evident decline, along the count of patients in the ICU. Praise be!

The city hasn’t even had to make full use of the extra hospital space added for the emergency, such as the USNS Comfort. New York not only didn’t run out of ventilators, as feared for so long, it’s sending some to other states.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s PAUSE orders, and all New Yorkers’ other curve-flattening moves, made the difference.

What a change from the days when Cuomo (quite understandably) was railing, “You pick the 26,000 people who are going to die” because the feds were sending just 400 vents though the state wanted 30,000.

“What am I going to do with 400 ventilators?” Cuomo said then. Giving them away, it turns out: 100 apiece to New Jersey and Michigan and 50 to Maryland, with more hopefully to go.

Meanwhile, Rutgers University rolled out a new COVID-19 test on Wednesday that the feds have already approved. The new test can yield results within 25 hours, and patients don’t have to bear a swab jammed into the backs of their noses; they just spit into a test tube. “We’ve been given clear direction to produce as many as possible,” said Nicholas Melchiaorre, manager at Rutgers’ Clinical Genomics Lab.

Nor is that the only report of new tests, which is awesome: Mass testing is widely thought to be vital to allow lockdowns to end without a fresh spike in cases, hospitalizations and horror.

We’re past the worst of it, with clear signs that the general public can soon start leaving their apartments again and get back to work.

If it’s not the beginning of the end, it’s at least far, far more than the end of the beginning.