Sources like [1] put New York at 379 in 100,000 people, or 0.379% making it the 15th worst hit US state.

Bear in mind that even if everyone in the country lived to 100 then died of old age, you'd still have a 1% of people dying every year.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

Still, over three years around 1 out of 40 die of other causes.

Drug overdoses killed more than covid in NYC in 2021

~1% of the population dies every year.

I mean, yeah, some absurd fraction of NYC (25%? 50%?) got it before we knew how to treat it.

But it's less than a tenth of the total population loss, so it's probably not worth trying to figure out either if the actual toll was higher than the official death toll (maybe by a factor of two?), or if some in the first wave would have died by now of other causes.