trying to meaure the impact of Covid-era restrictions on mortality

Good research that's worth a look if you understand empirical work and are interested in the topic. It's really good work, as far as it goes. The authors find that restrictions had efficacy, but some restrictions (e.g., in schools) were not likely to be a net gain. Some limits/concerns:

-They use cross-sectional data when panel data would be far superior.
-They knock out the early months/deaths of the pandemic. This makes the modeling easier, but will definitely skew the results. (As a thought experiment, imagine a world where Covid kills off all the vulnerable people in the early stages. Restrictions will have exaggerated effectiveness.)
-Their decision (and stated reasons) to drop (only) the earliest wave is arbitrary, since the later waves also had significantly lower fatality rates, treatment protocols, etc.
-The authors talk about this, but it's difficult if not impossible to tease out the impact of vaccine availability and decisions on the dependent variable here.
-The authors mention Covid being listed as "the underlying cause", but they ignore the trouble with identifying Covid as the true underlying cause.
-The estimated values of human life (p. 10) seem to be independent of age, when there is tremendous sample selection bias in the ages of those who died.