An old article so not sure if this was already posted here. This should be considered a short-term snapshot impact of covid policy as of Dec 2021. The long-term impact of covid policy won't be known for maybe another 5-10 years. The core areas the article focused on are our health, economy, education, and social well-being. The methodology is by no mean perfect, especially on education where they had only partial data to work with. What does this snapshot say - there was no right or wrong answer. There were only hard trade-offs. I'm sure extremists on both sides will insist there was a right and wrong answer. Spoiler: TX, LA, NY, FL, CA, WY, NE https://www.politico.com/interactiv...w-each-state-fared-on-our-pandemic-scorecard/ From the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the toughest decisions about how to combat the virus fell on state leaders. Which businesses should stay open and which should shut their doors? Should schools close and for how long? Should masks be mandated? The answers weren’t obvious. State officials had limited information about the virus, and the trade-offs were difficult. Protect residents’ health and instruct them to stay home – but risk driving companies out of business and accelerating unemployment. Keep businesses open – but risk a rise in hospitalizations and deaths. Close schools to control spread – but risk damaging kids’ education. There was no optimal way to make those choices, and we’re still debating them. But nearly two years after the first cases of Covid-19 were detected in the United States, we are beginning to get enough data to start assessing the implications of those policy choices. POLITICO’s State Pandemic Scorecard pulls together what we know so far about how states fared during the pandemic, and how the choices each made impacted its residents, businesses and schools. The scorecard groups available data for policy outcomes into four categories — health, economy, social well-being and education — and generates scores in each area between zero and 100. What the scorecard shows is that the pandemic has played out in vastly different ways across America, and that those state decisions had real-life impacts. There was no optimal set of choices, no perfect path a governor or other state officials could have taken. Every choice came with negative consequences, some known ahead of time, some only discovered or appreciated months later. Here are some core takeaways: States that imposed more restrictions such as stay-at-home orders and mask requirements did experience lower rates of death and hospitalizations. But they also tended to have worse economic and educational outcomes. States whose economies are heavily dependent on tourism suffered the most economically, with Hawaii and Nevada hit hardest. No state did well in every policy area. Overall, rural states tended to fare better than more urbanized states on economic and educational outcomes. Many rural states, despite being less densely populated, ranked poorly in health outcomes, however. ...
