From https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page I compute 0.23% of NYC's population has died of Covid-19, counting confirmed + probable deaths and dividing by 8.399 million people. That's 1 out of every 421 people.

hm, care to explain more? that's exactly how I think about it. Total deaths in NYC attributable to covid (~20k) over the total population (8.5M) = ~.25%. In my mind this is a very easy lower bound to estimate, what am I missing here?

In anycase, even a rate of ~.1% would be absurd given ~20% of people are testing positive by antibody tests.

Actually, I was asking <i>you</i> to explain, or at least give your source.

I subsequently found what I believe you are working from here: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page which does specify New York City (as opposed to New York State) so both the numerator and denominator refer to the same thing.

Interestingly, they appear to be using a larger denominator than your 8.5 million (NYC metro vs. NYC proper perhaps?) and get a rate of 0.175% = 175.66/100,000, eg in the "citywide total" line of https://github.com/nychealth/coronavirus-data/blob/master/by...).

But this is at least closer to your figure than I was able to get previously.

whoops, I presumed you were asking about the math. My source is nytimes which pulls from the dataset you linked.

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...

Specifically has numbers for NYC. You can sum the boroughs or use the total listed below. Using confirmed by pcr cases you get ~15k/8.6 = ~.175% as you said.

Using probable excess deaths adds an extra 5k deaths, hence ~.25%