The pandemic reached Punjab in March 2020 with an early cluster traced to returning pilgrims, which led to the sealing of several villages in Nawanshahr district.
The lockdown removed the migrant workforce at exactly the moment paddy transplanting needed it, and Punjab's agriculture department pushed direct seeded rice as an emergency substitute, which is how that technology got its largest single season of adoption.
Gurdwaras ran oxygen langars during the second wave in 2021, providing free oxygen when the hospital system had failed, at Delhi and in Punjab.
The farm laws protest ran through the same period. The camps at the Delhi borders operated with their own medical arrangements and their own case count, and the relationship between the protest and the second wave was argued about at the time and never resolved.
Punjab's excess mortality in the pandemic, like India's, is contested and the official count is generally held to be a substantial undercount.
The pandemic demonstrated both of Punjab's characteristic capacities at once: an agricultural system that could not function without migrant labour, and a religious institution that could deliver oxygen faster than a state.
The lockdown stopped the harvest labour and the mandis at the same time, and the state ran the wheat procurement in staggered tokens, which mostly worked.
The migrant workforce left on special trains and the industry took months to get it back. The farm sector was the least disrupted part of the economy and the towns were the most.
The gurdwara langars fed people at scale across Punjab and Delhi through both waves, and the oxygen langars in 2021 were a direct extension of the same institution.