Authors Response to Letters to the editor regarding: ‘Assessing mandatory stay‐ At‐ Home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID‐ 19’

We are pleased to see the active discussion around our study on the relationship between mandatory stay- at- home and business closures and COVID-19 spread.1 In this response, we address issues raised in three letters.2-4 The claim that the study had sample size of n=10 countries is incorrect.2 Each of the 16 regression models represented in Figure 4 included, on average, 1,362 data points (range 771-3,493) on 52 subnational units (range 27-129). Each panel regression is, in effect, a "mini-meta-analysis": the effect size is evaluated within each subnational unit, and the overall effect size is estimated from a pooling of these "within" effects. So while we aggregated the results to 10 countries, the sample size is not n=10.