Manhattan offices emptied through the COVID-19 pandemic are coming back to life though they still have ways to go before getting to their pre-pandemic bustle. More than 2.4 million square feet of Manhattan office space was leased in August, the most since January 2020. Asking rent price, at nearly $73 per square foot was about 9 percent below August 2019, according to data from the Colliers brokerage Availability rate, at nearly 17 percent, was still more than 74 percent above what it was in August 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic and the following government restrictions pushed office employees to remote work. Moreover, the year-to-date lease total was only 13.9 million, barely above the 13.6 million in the same period in the disastrous 2020. August office visits were still half of those in August 2019, according to an analysis by Placer.ai, a location analytics company, which looked at data on 40 office …