A Response to Philippe Lemoine's Critique on our Paper "Causal Impact of Masks, Policies, Behavior on Early Covid-19 Pandemic in the U.S."

TL;DR

This paper responds to critiques of a previous Covid-19 policy impact study by re-analyzing updated data, finding that the original conclusions remain robust despite the critiques.

Contribution

It provides a re-examination of updated data to address specific critiques, reinforcing the original study's findings on Covid-19 policies.

Findings

Re-analysis confirms original conclusions.

Updated data does not significantly alter results.

Original policy impact estimates remain robust.

Abstract

Recently, Phillippe Lemoine posted a critique of our paper "Causal Impact of Masks, Policies, Behavior on Early Covid-19 Pandemic in the U.S." [arXiv:2005.14168] at his post titled "Lockdowns, econometrics and the art of putting lipstick on a pig." Although Lemoine's critique appears ideologically driven and overly emotional, some of his points are worth addressing. In particular, the sensitivity of our estimation results for (i) including "masks in public spaces" and (ii) updating the data seems important critiques and, therefore, we decided to analyze the updated data ourselves. This note summarizes our findings from re-examining the updated data and responds to Phillippe Lemoine's critique on these two important points. We also briefly discuss other points Lemoine raised in his post. After analyzing the updated data, we find evidence that reinforces the conclusions reached in the original study.