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Georgia has several things working against it - higher black population which is said to be more vulnerable, higher obesity/diabetes, no universal health care of course, probably insufficient testing, an early hot spot down in Albany ....

And the death rate is less than half that of Sweden.  Reported death rate.

Exactly.  Reported death rate.

But it's possible that Sweden has far more actual cases than Georgia, and we just don't know because there's not enough testing in either place to really approach discovering that upper bound.

Sweden might have more deaths simply because they've allowed more infections in a shorter amount of time, they've allowed it intentionally to penetrate deeper into their population more quickly, while Georgia was locking down to prevent the spread.

Perhaps Sweden's national health care system wasn't as well equipped to prevent deaths?

From The Dispatch:

COVID-19: Not Just For Your Lungs Anymore

By now, most of us have the slogan drilled into our brains that the novel coronavirus is not a flu, but rather something far stranger and deadlier. But we still mainly think of the germ as flu-adjacent—a respiratory bug accompanied by fever and coughing, which kills, when it kills, by clogging the lungs with fluid and suffocating its victims of oxygen.

A growing number of doctors are becoming convinced it’s not so simple. Instead, they’re seeing patients whose COVID-created pneumonia is brought under control—only for a slew of other systems in the body to begin to go haywire. “What this virus does is it starts as a viral infection and becomes a more global disturbance to the immune system and blood vessels—and what kills is exactly that,” Dr. Mandeep Mehra of Harvard University’s medical school recently told the Seattle Times. “Our hypothesis is that COVID-19 begins as a respiratory virus and kills as a cardiovascular virus.”

Sweden *should* be doing better than Georgia. It's a relatively rich nation, with a good healthcare system and a strong social safety net. Supposedly 40% of residents are in single-person households which should reduce spread, and relatively low numbers of multi-generation households with elders. And I can say from having traveled there that people in general looked a little more healthy in general than in Georgia -- much lower levels of obesity, anyway.

Maybe the lack of multigenerational households caused a problem? I.e. if most seniors are in senior living facilities where spread was easy, it could be that they got slammed there whereas more of the elderly in Georgia are in homes where people have been staying home and avoiding infection?

I don't understand why death rates are so high in Sweden...

I had a theory it had something to do with smoking, because it is more common in Europe.  11% of Swedish people smoke.  Bingo, right?

Nope.  More than 17% of adults in Georgia smoke.  That's adults vs. total population, so not exactly apples to apples, but I guess my theory doesn't hold up.

17.5% of adults smoke in Georgia, though.  Really? 

WTH?  18.8% of Pennsylvania adults smoke?

Those numbers seem crazy high.  

hopefully those percentages are coming down quickly, year after year

hopefully, they're not being replaced by younger ones

Illinois did 29,266 tests yesterday, and reported 4,014 new cases. Both are highs in this thing.