To gauge the seriousness of COVID, the flu is a good comparison because we are familiar with it, it appears to have approximate severity and transmissibility. The case fatality rate for the seasonal flu is commonly listed at 0.1%. However, this number is likely falsely high.
On average, roughly 15% of the US population gets infected with flu virus every year, though this figure varies from 5% to 20% on any given year. However, one quarter of those infected essentially have minimal or no symptoms.
Since there are so many asymptomatic/mild cases of flu, it is difficult to determine the total burden of disease, and hence the true fatality rate. A high quality review found that on average, and across regions, the flu kills 5.9 people out of every 100,000 of the general population, whether infected or not.
We can extrapolate from this to get a rough estimate of the fatality rate of the flu. If 5.9 out of 100,000 people in a given population die of the flu, and the flu infects roughly 15% of those 100,000, this means that the rate of flu death is around 0.04%. This is less than half of the commonly reported flu fatality rate of 0.1%.
The best case we have right now for lowest fatality rate of COVID is 0.6% coming out of South Korea. From our analysis above, it seems COVID is around ten times as deadly as the seasonal flu.
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