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

Loose Cannon said

Makes sense - but I think you ought to still start with the two most similar states (with different re-opening policies) possible.

Wish I wasn't swamped with work - this is what I do for a living. I'd love to mess around with it, but I'm absolutely buried right now.

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While controlling for variables by taking two similar states would make the stats easier to interpret...it also would in many ways defeat the purpose of the study in the first place. I'm not interested in just running stats for the fun of it...I would like to be able to draw interesting conclusions that myself and others care about. I feel like I have to analyze either NY or California, because they are on one extreme. The other group ideally would have similarities to either NY or California, but unfortunately, there is no good control group for the extreme left (a similar state politically with similar COVID incidence, but with different benchmarks for return). The only way I can draw interesting conclusions is by doing an observational analysis using the benchmarks as the control for the opposing state.