New York hospital admissions have been increasing steadily since September 4: https://forward.ny.gov/daily-hospitalization-summary-region
The idea that they remain below the spring peak, when people were dying in ambulances waiting to be offloaded and bodies were being piled into refrigerated trucks and u-hauls, is somehow a sign that things are in healthy shape, is obscenely wrong and wrong-headed.
Yes, all viruses mutate, but that doesn't make that fact harmless. The majority of mutations are either neutral or harm the virus's virulence, but a minority increase the danger from the virus in one way or another. There have indeed been two mutations now documented that increase the overall danger from this virus. The spread of one, originally found in the U.K., increases your chances of catching it if exposed. And if you catch it, while odds are you won't get too sick, there is about a ten percent chance of your getting seriously ill and about a two percent chance of your dying. How many of you, if told the plane you were about to get on, had a ten percent chance of crashing resulting in your serious injury and a two percent chance of crashing and killing you, would get on the plane? The new South African strain may be resistant to the vaccines, which could mean a whole new ball game pretty much equivalent to an entirely new pandemic. And the fact that all viruses mutate also means that there are other, newer mutations out there not yet detected. Indeed, the more people who get the virus, even if not ill at all, increases the number of mutations that will occur, including the number of potentially more dangerous mutations. That's part of the danger with the new UK strain.
The only way to avoid these risks is not to catch it in the first place, which means taking precautions, including assuming that anyone and everyone you meet could be contagious but asymptomatic, and as the infection rate rises, that means this assumption becomes ever closer to an accurate fact.