"The correct data points and the proper statistical analysis".
Translated as: "I don't want to believe this so I'm going to throw out some big words that I may or may not understand so that I can look smart.
The author is a political scientist, not a statistician. I think anyone with an understanding of what he's doing will see why his methodology is questionable. Here's the biggest issue in my opinion:
The number of deaths is one of the primary reasons states chose their Covid-19 response strategy. The seven states that did not adopt a shelter-in-place strategy are obviously not interested in doing so
because they have a low death count. So if we consider the number of deaths that occur in a state with shelter-in-place, like Michigan, against a state without shelter-in-place, like Arkansas, we would see more deaths in Michigan. In his regression model, that is an indication that shelter-in-place doesn't work, because there are more deaths in Michigan than Arkansas. That makes no sense.
Michigan is implementing shelter-in-place
because of the number of deaths while Arkansas is lax about this because of their lack of number of deaths. The same goes for cases. This analysis doesn't show whether the strategy is working so much as it indicates prior history of how badly covid-19 has affected that state.