I am trying to come up with a way to assign values to dates in my panda's data frame. I currently have a list of dates grouped by "state" as shown in the screenshot. I would like to have "03-01-2020" be "day 1" and the current day be the last day-- in a column called "day". I tried using this code to create the dictionary I could use in the Pandas dataframe with the code below.

counter = 0

dict1 = {}

for i in df.date:

if i not in dict1:

counter +=1

dict1[i] = counter

Now I would like to create a column where the day corresponds to the date. How would I do that?

date state Deaths Cases 1 2020-03-01 AK 0 15.5000 2 2020-03-02 AK 0 28.4048 3 2020-03-03 AK 0 43.8333 4 2020-03-04 AK 0 60.8905 5 2020-03-05 AK 0 81.3548