State Pandemic Scorecard. For the past year, POLITICO’s Recovery Lab project has been chronicling how the pandemic is playing out around the country with a special eye to the innovations and policies enacted by officials at the state and local levels. We’ve noticed differences in how the pandemic has affected states, but it’s been hard to figure out just how large, and how meaningful, those differences have been. Some of the differences were the result of inherent factors, like the makeup of a state’s economy, including how dependent
it is on tourism. But some differences were also the result of decisions made by public officials.

More than 18 months into the pandemic, the impacts of those decisions are showing up in data that can be tracked and evaluated. This scorecard pulls that data together in an accessible format that readers can use to see how policy trade-offs have played out so far in each state, and help inform state responses going forward.