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Patterns of COVID-19 cases and deaths vary considerably through time and space.2. COVID-19 cases and deaths concentrated in areas of increased social vulnerability at different times of the year.3. Differences exist between examined variables contribution's to risk of infection and their respective contribution's to risk of mortality.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19, ICD-10-CM, U07.1, and 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease) pandemic is currently affecting much of the world. As of January 30, 2021, 11 months (325 days) into the pandemic and 1 year since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), there are over 100 million confirmed cases of the disease and over 2

Prior work suggests drought exacerbates US air quality by increasing surface ozone concentrations. We analyze 2005–2015 tropospheric column concentrations of two trace gases that serve as proxies for surface ozone precursors retrieved from the OMI/Aura satellite: Nitrogen dioxide (ΩNO2; NOx proxy) and formaldehyde (ΩHCHO; VOC proxy). We find 3.5% and 7.7% summer drought enhancements (classified by SPEI) for ΩNO2 and ΩHCHO, respectively, corroborating signals previously extracted from ground‐level observations. When we subset by land cover type, the strongest ΩHCHO drought enhancement (10%) occurs in the woody savannas of the Southeast US. By isolating the influences of precipitation and temperature, we infer that enhanced biogenic VOC emissions in this region increase ΩHCHO independently with both high temperature and low precipitation during drought. The strongest ΩNO2 drought enhancement (6.0%) occurs over Midwest US croplands and grasslands, which we infer to reflect the sensitivity of soil NOx emissions to temperature.