KAROL MARKOWICZ: Florida puts New York to shame in rational pandemic policies.

It’s a lie, though, that Floridians aren’t taking the novel coronavirus seriously. What they have done is discard the policies that don’t work, while retaining the ones that do.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, on the day he closed indoor dining in New York City, noted that COVID spread in restaurants amounted to 1.4 percent of cases. In Florida, they decided numbers like that meant indoor dining stays open. In New York, we foolishly didn’t.

In Florida, DeSantis prioritized school openings. In New York, Cuomo puffed out his chest and said he was in charge of schools but then washed his hands of them when it was time to do the hard work of getting them open.

And Florida’s policies bore good fruit. On Jan. 9, New York ­reported 17,839 new cases. Florida, with about 2 million more people than New York, had 15,445. An open state like Florida having fewer COVID cases than a mostly closed state like New York proves protracted lockdowns are a ­failure.

And that disparity has led people like Rich Azzopardi, a senior adviser to Cuomo, to spin bizarro conspiracy theories on Twitter that Florida has “cooked the book on case numbers.” It’s much harder to admit that his boss destroyed restaurants and other businesses for no reason.

Hell, the United Arab Emirates has a better handle on public health than Cuomo does:

While the American Left shrieks about “fairness” in distributing the vaccine, the UAE is just distributing it.