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].
CFR is a terrible metric - you should be using IFR. CFR is of course going to be much higher than the IFR, probably orders of magnitude higher.
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.
Using CFR to determine fatality rate of COVID is as effective as it would be for skydiving. If you only count people who go to hospital (because they're frightfully sick -- or splatted out of an aircraft) and compare that to those who walk out of hospital you're exhibiting massive adverse selection bias.
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]
[1]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...