The unraveling of state power in eastern Oklahoma is fascinating to watch — if you don’t happen to live there. The Supreme Court last year, in a case called McGirt, basically revived a set of historical Native American reservations, which now cover about two million people and the city of Tulsa. McGirt dealt only with “federal criminal law,” and its results in that sphere have been bizarre.

For the first nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were no officially approved outpatient treatments for combating the disease. From March 2020, when the virus first emerged in the United States, until that November, when the Food and Drug Administration authorized emergency use of monoclonal antibodies, health authorities advised that the infected do little but quarantine themselves, drink plenty of fluids and rest unless hospitalization was necessary.

In my home state of California, smash-and-grab is fast becoming a way of life. Crime is a rampant, daily occurrence.

Governments’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic varied greatly from state to state. What sorts of consequences did governmental actions have? A new study by Erik Randolph of the Georgia Center for Opportunity helps shed some light on how each state fared during the first year-and-a-half of the pandemic.

Viruses mutate all the time, including the one, SARS-CoV-2, that’s caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Although most genetic changes are innocuous, some can make the mutant more adept at infecting cells, for example, or evading antibodies. Such “fitter” variants can outcompete other strains, so that they become the predominant source of infections. A succession of more-transmissible variants has emerged over the past year, each harboring a constellation of mutations. The most worrisome so far is the so-called delta variant. It’s become dominant in much of the world since its discovery in India in October 2020, leading to surges in cases and hospitalizations, especially in places where less than half the adult population has been fully immunized.