Count of Geo Querys of Millions of Documents Extremely Slow

I have a 5M record dataset including Geo locations upon which I want to search to find points within a selected area.

The operation yields results quickly but I need a count of the points in the area as well. If I make a selection of a city or entire state on this data the count query takes 45 seconds or more to execute.

There is a similar problem if I want to sort the results of a find (NOT a count in this case) regardless of indexing.

This thread has additional info

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/mongodb-user/geo$20performance/mongodb-user/UQNiXAHZHP0/2nu9unVFQ3QJ