[marklacey]

Sweden has 1/4th the population of California. It looks like the total deaths is around 50% higher than California although of course California might have deaths that should have been attributed to COVID-19 that weren’t.

It looks like it was estimated to have arrived in Sweden two days earlier.

[raincom]

Maybe, Swedish towns are denser than California ones.

[marklacey]

The SF Bay Area has a population that is 75% of Sweden’s entire population.

SF itself is more densely populated than Sweden’s most densely populated city which appears to be Stockholm (7700/km^2 vs 5000/km^2). Stockholm has a population around 20% larger than SF.

According to Wikipedia, California is smaller than Sweden.

So there may be some dense pockets in Sweden but it certainly isn’t more densely populated than California and it doesn’t appear that there are large cities that approach the density of NYC/SF.