COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US)

Loose Cannon said
I don't think you can use Texas due to our climate, diversity and the spread-outedness of it. There's not really a corollary for Texas anywhere in the country. Same problem with Cali and Florida. Texas vs. California doesn't really work either because we don't have any mass transit, and our population density in the cities is still much lower than Cali. I think you'd need to pick two relatively homogenous states that have similar climates and population densities.

I'd do Illinois vs. Indiana, or Michigan vs. Pennsylvania. Probably the latter, because with IL vs. IN you have one with a huge city and one without.

You definitely have to control for climate, though. I'm pretty confident the hot southern states and California are faring better right now because of the weather.

This might help: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-map-coronavirus.html

I hope you go forward with it - always interested in this type of analysis.

I'm not going to get into the stats that much. I'm not going to try to pull off a multivariant analysis. That would be crazy time consuming and I agree, I don't think that I'd be able to control for all of the variables. I think that the smarter route is to look at the policies, their goal outcome measures, how they are measuring up to those goals, and whether what the state is doing is reasonable based on their stats, outcome measures, and goals. Then I'd assume that the stats were associated with the opposite state, and determine if their decisions would or SHOULD be different based on their outcome measures and goals for reopening. It's going to be an observational study...but honestly, I think that it may be more valuable than anything the internet currently has.