Challenges in determining causality: An ongoing critique of Bendavid et al’s ‘Assessing mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID‐19

We are happy to respond to Bendavid et al. on the matter of their paper [1] (the authors, henceforth). Given the subject matter impacts on lives across the globe, we are pleased to have the opportunity to continue this worthwhile discussion. While the authors have written a response [2] to our initial concerns [3,4,5], we feel that it falls short in a number of key ways, and thus the paper still does not propose a useful assessment of the efficacy of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) against COVID-19.