the CFR is only as low as 0.5-1% when there is adequate medical care and the population is otherwise healthy. in NYC the CFR for the 18-45 cohort is ~5%[1].
[1]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
[1]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...
IFR data hasn't been available until recently because you need A) randomized sampling and B) antibody tests, which have only just been rolled out.
The most up-to-date IFR data suggests that "0.5%" is actually an astoundingly high overestimate for any reasonable metric of "number of people who die from this", and that's before adjusting for the fact that the people who die were usually going to die soon anyway.
12k deaths in NYC gives a pretty hard lower bound on IFR of 0.14%.
The IFR will end up higher than 0.5% if incidence in city is any lower than 27%, which seems very reasonably likely.
For H1N1 swine flu, CFR was between 0.1% and 5.1% depending on the country. The IFR was 0.02%.
For COVID it's between 0.07% and 15%. The IFR is probably in the lower quartile of the 0.1%-1% range. [1]