With COVID cases rising again, Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to keep the public-transit mask mandate a while longer. That’s nuts, since actual bad COVID results are nowhere to be seen.
It’s nice that Hochul greeted the rise in cases by saying, “We’re not panicking,” but New York needs actual leadership, not just an absence of hysteria.
The city Department of Health says Omicron-driven cases, running around 600 a day in early March, have risen steadily to 1,981 on April 8.
But, as The Post’s Steve Cuozzo notes, “Six weeks since the wave began, hospitalizations have actually dropped. Per the DOH, hospital cases that were in the low 40s per day in late February fell, for whatever reason, to the 20s by mid-March — where they have remained in April.”
And New Yorkers have had enough: Though the MTA officially still requires masking, we’re already seeing a marked decline in compliance since Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down the federal transportation mask mandate on Monday.
The pandemic is over, with the bug now a danger only on par with the flu. And the city desperately needs to get fully back to normalcy, which requires all mandates to go. As Mayor Eric Adams says, “We have to learn to live with COVID.”
That’s why he and Hochul should be ditching all remaining mandates, not making excuses such as Adams’ “New York is unique: We’re densely populated” justification for retaining his last mandates.
The threat is gone; only the anxiety remains — and our leaders should be getting New Yorkers past those fears, not pandering to them.
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