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.