Colorado’s Gov Gets It

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis just put many of his fellow Democrats to shame — including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul — by stating the blunt truth about COVID. “The emergency is over,” Polis rightly declared Friday. People have had “more than enough opportunity to get vaccinated”; as for those who get sick, “it’s almost entirely their own darn fault,” since catching COVID after getting jabbed is “rare.” And if you do catch it, the vaccine makes your case much milder.

Polis vowed not to impose a new mask mandate on his state, even with the spread of Omicron. “Public health [officials] would say to always wear a mask because it decreases” airborne illnesses. But “you don’t tell people to wear a jacket when they go out in winter.”

Spot on. Pols need to let people make their own COVID decisions, right or wrong — especially since the unvaxxed are no longer much of a health threat to the rest of us.

Alas, Dems like Hochul just can’t resist socking the public with new restrictions, even when much of the population (80 percent in New York) has been vaccinated and more are naturally immune after past infection.

Indeed, the same day Polis spoke sense, Hochul was slamming New Yorkers with yet another mandate: Unless everyone in a “public place” (an oxymoron, since it includes private offices!) is vaxxed, they must all mask up indoors. Way to further delay the city’s reopening, gov.

Yes, New York has seen an uptick in cases (with an average of 1,459 a day over the past 28 days in the city). That metric, a spokeswoman told The Post Monday, is one of three that figured into Hochul’s decision.

But even the COVID-hyping New York Times notes that cases are nearly irrelevant now, since, as Drs. Monica Gandhi and Leslie Bienen write, “a case of COVID-19 doesn’t mean what it used to . . . Most breakthrough infections remain mild.” They urge lawmakers to focus on hospitalization rates instead. (Nice of the Times to finally admit it!)

And yes, the number of hospitalized COVID patients has also grown in New York, hitting 3,683 on Sunday. But it’s still far lower than at the pandemic’s height, and rising only in areas that have lower vaccination rates.

The gov should take a tip from her Colorado colleague: The emergency is over. It’s time to move on. Stop ordering extreme measures that do no real good — other than letting you claim you’re “leading.”