Mayor Eric Adams “can’t wait” to phase out mask and vaccine mandates in New York City, saying he has a plan to do so and looks forward to a “real transformation.”

Great. But why is Gov. Kathy Hochul so behind the curve here?

Hochul has, after all, showed she’s learned from one COVID mistake: She’s declining to enforce a mandate that all health-care workers in the state get booster shots. 

Her last mandate for this sector was disastrous: She literally had to send the National Guard into health facilities across New York. 

So her modest pivot now is beyond welcome. But: If mandates are so problematic that they require selective enforcement, why have them at all?

Adams — after a big fumble when pressed on the nonsensical policy that keeps unvaccinated Brooklyn Nets point guard Kyrie Irving from playing in home games — has gotten the picture. Hochul needs to catch up.

Omicron has receded. Hochul has already lifted her indoor-mask mandate (except, insanely, in schools). And despite lingering malaise, New York’s economy is (very slowly) starting to come back. 

It’s time to ditch the whole mandate concept and think about COVID as an endemic problem to be treated as any other endemic disease, like the flu. 

Look at states that avoided COVID overreactions.Idaho has an unemployment rate of 2.4%; Utah, 1.9%. Florida, that great bugbear of COVID alarmists, is at 4.4%— close to the national average —and its labor force has grown. New York lags at an anemic 6.2%. 

That’s to say nothing of quality of life. In cities and states without severe pandemic restrictions, people for months have gone about their daily lives breathing freely, never digging out their vaccine cards. Kids don’t pointlessly mask up in schools. And businesses operate without burning time and energy on ever-changing “emergency” regulations. 

And they’re safe: Mandates on the whole just don’t correlate with lower death or hospitalization rates, or even case rates.

Hochul likes to hem and haw while claiming the need for more data. This builds up the false sense of fear that many now feel at the thought of the mandates’ end, and drives the all-too-real frustration at illogical public health rules that require constant, chaotic, politics-driven carve-outs.

Leaving these rules in place tells us our leaders aren’t serious about moving beyond COVID, and so hinders New York’s economic recovery while supercharging the exodus —we’ve been the No. 1 state in outmigration, two years in a row. 

You’ve made a start, governor. Emulate Eric, move to ditch all these policies, embrace the pandemic’s end — and let New York and New Yorkers move on.