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Mortality in people under 40 for Covid-19 is only 0.2% according to the CCDC study:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

We’d be seeing a number of deaths in older people who would have otherwise been fine

The mortality estimates we have now are mostly based on numbers coming out of China, which are just not reliable.

We should have better estimates in a couple of months, once more numbers come out of countries outside of China.

Also, mortality rates are impacted not just by the disease itself but things such as how overwhelmed the health care system is, what measures are used to treat the disease, how many people actually get treated, population-specific or location-specific factors, etc.

All of these factors could vary widely from place to place and cause different mortality rates, even if the virus infecting everyone is the same.

In either demographic the mortality is so much higher than the flu that it would be noticed. Otherwise we wouldn’t be worried; it would be like just another strain of the flu.

To be fair, even if this new virus was equally deadly as the flu, it would be concerning. We don't have a "tamiflu" to treat it, it's more contagious than the flu, and could therefore overwhelm our health care systems.

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