To add an understandable frame of reference to the COVID-19 situation in New York City, I plotted the daily deaths from C19 in NYC against the average number of daily deaths in the city as well as the average number of deaths by the two leading causes, heart disease and cancer as well as flu and influenza. I think this is a useful way to sidestep the question about what percentage of the actual cases are actually identified. When there are twice the expected number of bodies in the morgue with only 0.4% of the population confirmed to be infected, it doesn't matter much if the true infection rate is 5x higher. Letting this "run it's course" isn't an option. Here is the same chart for the entire US: That shows that even in the US overall this is eclipsing the flu, although not nearly as bad as NYC. Dropping the total deaths, cancer and heart disease lines we can see that already in the US Covid-19 has eclipsed many well known causes of death: ...