Sea breeze, you made a mistake in your calculation; you are out by a factor of 10. Your “death rate” of 0.05% should be 0.5%.
In any event, you don’t calculate death rate by dividing the number of deaths by the number who currently have it, because that leaves out the people who currently have COVID-19 and will die. You calculate by dividing the number of deaths (currently 23k) by the number of recoveries.
Currently, about 23k have died in NY. Therefore, even if you assume all 15% of 19.5 million people (about 3 million) have recovered and none will die (an unlikely optimistic assumption), you still get 0.0077, or 0.77%, which is nearly 8 times deadlier than flu.
I twice previously mentioned death rate is problematic to calculate at this stage (primarily because 2/3 of the world’s COVID-19 cases haven not yet recovered, and it seems to kill a lot of people who seem to have partially recovered), but data from countries where most of the people have recovered suggest a death rate of around 2 to 3% (or 20 to 30 times deadlier than the flu).