how to check if a pipeline variable is empty

Question

Team, I have a Jenkins job that runs every 5minutes and sends a slack notify to channel. but I want to not send slack if there is 0 returned in count variable.

how to achieve this? like with if else in Jenkins pipeline?

current code

 stage('Run') {
      when { expression { !params.Refresh } }
      steps {
        script {
        sh "ls -lrt src/jenkins/pipelines/sre/"
        sh("cd src/jenkins/pipelines/sre/program-pod-stuck/ && python3 stuckPodInfo.py")
        count = sh(script: """cd src/jenkins/pipelines/sre/program-pod-stuck/ && cat count""", returnStdout: true).trim()
        slackSend(channel: "#team-alerts", message: "${count} pods from user workflow pods are stuck. <${env.BUILD_URL}console|Details>")
        println count
        }
      }

proposed code to run conditionally.

 stage('Run') {
      when { expression { !params.Refresh } }
      steps {
        script {
        sh "ls -lrt src/jenkins/pipelines/sre/"
        sh("cd src/jenkins/pipelines/sre/program-pod-stuck/ && python3 stuckPodInfo.py")
        count = sh(script: """cd src/jenkins/pipelines/sre/program-pod-stuck/ && cat count""", returnStdout: true).trim()
        if $count != '0' {
        slackSend(channel: "#team-alerts", message: "${count} pods from user workflow pods are stuck. <${env.BUILD_URL}console|Details>")
        } else {
        echo 'no pods stuck, suppressing slack alert'
        }
        println count
        }
      }