I think NY is actually worse than anywhere else; certainly in the US and pretty much the world. I understand you disagree, and since neither knows, I don't find it worth arguing about. But I'm bringing it up anyway to say if I'm right, the mystery is why. The subway hypothesis has come under attack. I think it is valid, but nowhere near the whole story. We closed late, but that does not seem able to explain it all, and we're past the point where that effect should be diminished more. Density, international travel, etc. yes, these are all in NY, but we're not the absolute world leader in all of those categories (including time of closure and mass transit use) and I'm not sure we even lead (or lag the most) in any of them. Further, we never ran short of ventilators, and almost everyone who went on a ventilator died anyway. I'm not sure about ICU beds, but nobody seems to think that's a primary reason we have such a high death rate, and our death rate was already terrible before we hit the peak where any shortage would have come into play. I focus on death rate because I'm convinced it's the best of the imperfect data we have.
I expect you point to these anomalies as the reason for why you think NY is not an outlier and we only seem to be. That's a fair opinion. Again, we don't know. Either way there's a mystery we'll have to wait for.