Islam SJ, Nayak A, Hu Y, et al. - This study attempted to explore the temporal association of county-level Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), a percentile-based measure of social vulnerability to disasters, its subcomponents, and race/ethnic composition with COVID-19 incidence and mortality in the USA in the year starting in March 2020. Researchers enrolled 3,091 counties with ≥ 50 COVID-19 cases by 6 March 2021 in the study. They evaluated relationships between SVI (and its subcomponents) and county-level racial composition with incidence and death per capita by fitting a negative-binomial mixed-effects model. The findings revealed that except for the winter ‘third wave’ when the majority of the white communities had the highest incidence of cases, counties with greater social vulnerability and proportionately higher minority populations experienced worse COVID-19 outcomes.