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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:
If every category were given equal weight — which assumes each priority was of equivalent importance, a policy choice in itself — the top scorer overall would be Nebraska, with an average of 73 out of 100, despite scoring below the national average in the social well-being category. Maryland would be second, with an average score of 66 on the basis of a high score in the social well-being category, despite scoring below average in the economic category. It did not have enough data for an education score.
One state that performed fairly evenly across the board was Minnesota, which has the fifth highest average score and and had no score in any policy area lower than 48. In an interview, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, said that was a deliberate choice, that his team worked hard to “make sure we were looking at all of the unintended consequences, not just from a health outcome but also social implications and the economy.”
Throughout, state officials could not avoid the political consequences of their decisions, and that played out differently in different states. For his part, Walz said he knew that shutdown orders and other restrictions would be unpopular, but he still made the call to impose them.
“I got to the point where I was saying ‘Please, just wear the mask so you live long enough to vote against me,’” Walz said.
The scorecard illustrates the sobering reality of those trade-offs, based on the data currently available.
David Rubin, a pediatrician and director of the PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, compared making policy during a pandemic to walking a tightrope.
“There’s a trade-off between the degree of pandemic response and economic activity,” Rubin said. “The best performers are people who are constantly weighing those two together to maximize safety but try to minimize the impact on our lives.”
Here’s what the scorecard reveals in the four different policy areas. For more information on why and how we calculated these scores, please read our Editor’s Note.
During the pandemic, Republican-led states tended to be more resistant to mask mandates and stay-at-home edicts while Democratic governors, by and large, embraced those public health precautions, even at the expense of the local economy.
That pattern is evident in the scorecard’s health category; the states with better health outcomes tend to be run by Democratic or moderate Republican governors who imposed health restrictions and reopened slowly. Fourteen of the top 15 states in health voted for President Joe Biden, with the exception of Alaska.
Some states also had geographic advantages. Those with smaller populations and limited geographic footprints fared better: Seven of the top 10 states in health share those features, even with the data adjusted for population. Isolated states like Hawaii and Alaska also saw fewer cases and hospitalizations.
Large southern states with Republican governors, however, experienced worse health outcomes. Almost all of the states ranked at the bottom for health voted for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
Vermont, a blue state run by a Republican governor, earned a nearly perfect score in the health category. Health officials there credit the state’s decision to lift lockdown restrictions in phases.
“The term that was always used by the governor was ‘turning the spigot,’” said Mark Levine, Vermont’s health commissioner. “It was never a full turn, it was always a quarter turn … and see if everything was still going well before we opened the next quarter turn.”
Vermont also led the nation in its vaccination rate, with 74 percent of the state’s population fully vaccinated. State officials said their vaccination strategy focused on making people eligible based on age rather than status as essential workers. It also incorporated equity provisions in its vaccination plan by becoming the second state, behind Montana, to explicitly give Black adults and people from other minority communities priority status.
Even though Covid-19 is more deadly for people over 65, one factor that didn’t play a significant role in states’ score on the health metrics was the age of the population. POLITICO ran a calculation adjusting the rates of deaths and hospitalizations by the age of each state’s population, and it didn’t significantly change the scores or the rankings.
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The scorecard suggests states that had fewer shutdowns and more rural geography tended to fare better economically than more urban states that imposed more public health restrictions.
States that shut down only briefly – or not at all – rebounded far quicker than those that remained closed. Many of the states that did not issue orders directing residents to refrain from participating in nonessential activities – including Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and Utah – had better-than-average economic outcomes on the scorecard.
Again, a state’s political orientation appears to have played a role; eight of the top 10 states in the economic category voted for Trump and were led by Republican governors. All 10 of the bottom states on the economy voted for Biden and nearly all have Democratic governors.
It also appears to matter whether a state was hit hard early in the pandemic. For the most part, states impacted by the first wave of the pandemic — including New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Jersey — were slower to lift lockdown measures and have had a more sluggish economic recovery.
“You basically had winners and losers chosen early in the pandemic,” said Jason Straczewski, vice president of government relations and political affairs for the National Retail Federation.
States heavily reliant on tourism suffered the worst. Hawaii and Nevada, which cite tourism as a key driver of state economic revenue, ranked at the bottom, with Hawaii earning 0 out of 100 points for its economy. Average monthly unemployment levels there quadrupled over pre-pandemic levels.
Hawaii’s decision early in the pandemic to shut the state to outside visitors “was an important move because we always believed that sound public health would lead to economic prosperity,” said Mark McCartney, director of Hawaii’s Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. “If you don’t have public health, you can’t have economic prosperity.”
The scorecard’s social well-being category was based on the change in three metrics – food insecurity, households’ economic hardship and violent crime — comparing states’ indicators to where they were before or early in the pandemic. With the federal government providing vast amounts of economic aid, a state’s score on food insecurity and household expenses during the pandemic largely reflects a state’s ability to implement those federal programs and get aid to residents who need it.
For the most part, states that scored well in the health category also scored well on social well-being. The states that did best came from different geographies and partisan leanings: Hawaii scored highest, followed by New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts and Indiana. Those that scored at the bottom were solidly red states: Wyoming, Mississippi, West Virginia, South Dakota and Arkansas.
Hawaii started out with high levels of food insecurity and household hardship early in the pandemic, but brought those levels down significantly despite the huge hit its economy took from the collapse of tourism. It also saw a slight reduction in violent crime between 2019 and 2020.
A key factor in preventing hunger was the robustness of a state’s network of food banks. Carlos Rodriguez, president and CEO of Community Foodbank of New Jersey, said state leaders had already made commitments to address food insecurity before the pandemic struck, putting New Jersey in a strong position to deal with the food crisis. New Jersey scored second in the social well-being category.
“We initially knew we were going to be in for a hurting and said ‘We’ve gotta throw everything we can at this’,” Rodriguez said.
The third metric in the score was change in the rate of violent crime. Though experts disagree on why, violent crime has increased during the pandemic, although it remains below the levels of the 1980s and 1990s. Only 15 states saw decreases in violent crime, led by Vermont, which also got the top score in the health category.
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The most difficult policy area to assess at this point is education. Federal tests in reading and math were suspended early in the pandemic, and while some states have conducted their own testing, those assessments are not comparable across states. Schools, districts and state officials have few tools at this point in the pandemic to assess how their students have fared; federal data won’t be available until sometime next year at the earliest.
Currently, one of the only tools that is available is assessment data from private testing companies. POLITICO’s scorecard compiled data from three of those companies into a combined dataset that, while not necessarily representative of a state’s entire population, provides a preliminary snapshot of how a state’s students have fared during the pandemic.
The education score was derived from changes in reading and math assessments from each state’s pre-pandemic baseline to spring 2021. Many districts and schools also experienced drops in enrollment during the pandemic as students struggled to make the transition to online or hybrid education or experienced family difficulties. As a result, we also included change in public school enrollment in the education score.
The data provided by the companies represented a range of students by demographics and geography, but we can’t be certain how closely the final dataset is representative of a state’s population. The dataset includes some private and religious schools, so the results also may not match state testing that included only public schools. One company provided data only for students who took the test at school, as opposed to at home. The other two reported that a majority of tests were taken at school, or in districts where more than 50 percent of schools were not physically closed. Students who take assessment tests at home tend to score higher.
Because of these limitations, we have scored the education category more broadly, giving each state a rank of “little to no learning loss,” “some learning loss” or “most learning loss.” Two states, Maryland and Wyoming, were excluded from the education category because they did not have private testing data with a large enough sample to analyze. (Here’s more information about our scoring system.)
The main takeaway from this data backs up the consensus view in the education community that schools who had more days of in-person school have seen less learning loss in their students. Those decisions to keep students in school, of course, came with risks in other areas, and as with other categories in the scorecard, those trade-offs need to be weighed against their downsides: Many of the states whose students appear at this point to have done better also experienced poorer health outcomes.
For the most part, state leaders who imposed fewer pandemic restrictions on businesses also reopened schools for in-person learning sooner and longer. The scorecard reflects that connection as states who scored well in the education category generally also had better economic outcomes.
Some education policy experts we contacted in compiling the scorecard made the case that the data available now is too preliminary and partial for readers to reach any conclusions, primarily because we can’t gauge how representative the data is of each state’s student population. On the other hand, looking at what we know so far about academic achievement and enrollment trends may help states assess their own policy choices and make decisions now that could help struggling learners catch up this school year before they fall further behind.
The stakes are high; researchers warn that learning lost during the pandemic could set back a generation.
Each category was measured based on key metrics, with a total possible score of 100. Read more about our methodology.
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