2/ months of the pandemic are not included because there was little policy variation at that point and infection/death rates were largely determined by idiosyncratic factors (see the paper for evidence). The primary analysis looks at “packages” of weak versus strong restrictions, covering:

3/ restrictions, covering: activity limitations, mask requirements or prohibitions, & vaccine requirement or prohibitions. Key findings are that if all states had adopted restrictions similar to the 10 most restrictive states, there would have been 271 and 447 thousand fewer deaths