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.
翻译:最近,Philippe Lemoine在其题为“Lockdowns, Economics and the ArXiv:2005.14168”的文章中评论了我们的论文《面具、政策、行为对美国早期Covid-19大流行的冲击》[arXiv:2005.14168]。[arXiv:2005.14168]。 虽然Lemoine的批评似乎是意识形态驱动的,情绪过激,他的一些观点值得讨论。特别是,我们估算结果的敏感性在于(一) 包括“公共场所的面具”和(二) 更新数据似乎是重要的批评,因此,我们决定自己分析最新数据。本说明总结了我们从重新审查最新数据中得出的结论,并回应了Philippe Lemoine对这两个要点的批评。我们还简要讨论了他在文章中提出的其他要点。在分析最新数据后,我们发现了加强原始研究中得出的结论的证据。