Clinical, social, and policy factors in COVID-19 cases and deaths: methodological considerations for feature selection and modeling in county-level analyses.

Background: There is a need to evaluate how the choice of time interval contributes to the lack of consistency of SDoH variables that appear as important to COVID-19 disease burden within an analysis for both case counts and death counts.

Methods: This study identified SDoH variables associated with U.S county-level COVID-19 cumulative case and death incidence for six different periods: the first 30, 60, 90, 120, 150, and 180 days since each county had COVID-19 one case per 10,000 residents.