Gov. Andrew Cuomo needs to be more like famed inventor Thomas Edison.

It was Edison who famously said “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”

Last week, Cuomo said gyms won’t reopen any time soon because they aren’t safe.

“We know gyms are highly problematic,” Cuomo told reporters Thursday. “Not from our experience because we haven’t opened them, but we know from the other states that they’ve been highly problematic. They opened them and they had to close them. That’s a fact.”

Is that entirely true, though? We don’t know for a fact that the gyms themselves are problematic. We don’t know that people exercising with proper precautions are problematic.

Even as COVID-19 cases increased in Arkansas, for example, Gov. Asa Hutchinson said in early July that only 2% of new cases had been traced back to restaurants, bars and gyms. For every Texas, Florida or Georgia that have had issues with their gyms after they have reopened, there are Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey that have reopened gyms and not seen a workout-related COVID-19 spike.

We can agree with this aspect of the governor’s statement. Some states are well on the way to proving the 10,000 ways not to open a gym. What we need out of Cuomo and his crackerjack team at the state Health Department is to find the one way that opening a gym will work.

We don’t need the governor to wax rhapsodic about the failures of gyms in other states. We need him to invent the proverbial lightbulb and get these businesses reopened safely.