Georgia ranked 47th in the nation in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new state scorecard released by the Commonwealth Fund Thursday, June 16.
The Commonwealth Fund is a national non-profit that takes left-leaning positions on health care access and quality.
The organization releases state health system scorecards annually. This year, it added seven COVID-related measures to its evaluation.
The states that best managed COVID were Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont. Only Mississippi, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Alabama ranked worse than Georgia in responding to COVID, according to the new analysis.
According to the new scorecard, only a quarter of adults in Georgia were fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID by the end of March 2022, while the national average was 37%.
Georgia also saw higher rates of “excess deaths” than the U.S. average from February 2020 to April of this year, with 411 excess deaths per 100,000 people, compared to a national average of 345 per 100,000.
The excess death indicator evaluates the actual number of deaths against what is expected based on past trends. That includes COVID-related deaths as well as deaths due to non-COVID reasons.
Georgia had far higher rates of hospitalization for COVID than the national average, with 1,976 confirmed COVID case admissions per 100,000 people from August 2020 to March 2022. In the same period, the national average was 1,443 per 100,000.
The report card also looked at how many days hospital intensive care units were at or above 80% capacity between August 2020 and March 2022.
Georgia ICUs were at least 80% full for 375 days in that period, compared to the national average of just 112 days in the same timeframe.
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