For the past year, POLITICO’s Recovery Lab project has been reporting on how the Covid-19 pandemic has changed life in America with a specific eye to how state and local leaders are responding to those challenges. Those challenges can’t be minimized — stakes were literally life and death and information was often limited. Public officials have faced terrible trade-offs, but they have also directed new energy and tremendous resources to solving complex problems.

This project began with the idea that the 50 U.S. states aren’t just laboratories of democracy, as the adage goes, but also laboratories of public policy. Throughout the year, we have reported on how states and cities have rethought how they operate, in some cases adopting new approaches that haven’t just helped mitigate the pandemic but have helped solve other problems that have long bedeviled public officials. But there’s no getting around the fact that the backdrop to all that progress and innovation was an unprecedented wave of death, economic hardship and social distress.

So for the final issue of Recovery Lab, we’re going to try to capture that ying-and-yang of innovation and hardship wrought by the pandemic. We start with the upside: We asked POLITICO’s best-in-class policy reporters around the country to tell us about the most novel ideas that surfaced during the response to the novel coronavirus, and how those innovations will change the country going forward. The result is “17 pandemic innovations that are here to stay,” a roundup of the smartest and most far-reaching innovations spurred by the pandemic, from cocktails-to-go to mRNA vaccines.