How do they get to 0.5%? According to NYC data if you include "probable" cases, 15,400 people, or 0.18% of the population, are already dead. Wouldn't that imply 0.9% fatalities if the whole city was infected?
The gist of it is that the majority of deaths from COVID-19 were suffered by people who had some kind of other health issue. As of the most recent data (April 22 at 6pm), 61 deaths were from people with no underlying health issues, 7,474 from people known to have underlying health issues, and 2,755 from people with unknown status [0]. The elderly in poor health are much more likely to die than the young in poor health. But when healthy, the elderly have pretty close to the same fatality rate as the young [2].
[0]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...
[1]: Bottom of this page: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
[2]: Cross reference this with [0]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...
Interesting. Would those people still develop some form of immunity/resistance?