I generally agree, but it's hard to imagine that NYC could have been any worse just based on what we know about the virus, the living conditions, and the amount of time before they locked down. Its a recipe for disaster. But through it all, the response outpaced the need. Its pretty impressive, really.
It's hard to know exactly. NYC did shut a lot of things down, but certainly people were still on subways and what not. Hard to know exactly how much worse it would have been had they not shut anything down, or on the other side how much better it would have been had they shutdown subways and other things down completely.