It's like a rather bad influenza. The mortality rate is fairly low and difficult to estimate unless you test the entire population on a regular basis. It isn't like one of the outbreaks that kills 10%, 20%, 50% of the infected.
It shouldn't be ignored, but it also shouldn't be treated like a new black death. It is difficult for uninformed people to say "people are overreacting to a real threat".
That's true, but it has one characteristic that makes it very nasty: it is highly contagious before you show any symptoms. That makes it very hard to contain. So we only have two options: either try to contain it despite the difficulty, or just give up, let it spread, and essentially sacrifice 1% of the world's population. 1% is better than 10% of course, but that's still 70 million people.
In addition to all of the people it's going to kill, it will also decimate the world's intensive care resources. Many people who would otherwise die will live because they got a bed in intensive care. Conditions which complete for these ICU beds will see their fatality rate sky rocket.
It is incontrovertibly in the "serious" bucket.
It's the hallmark of being a conservative.
The bad-case version of this isn't people dying in the streets of the virus, it's people dying needlessly (some in the streets) of preventable things because the healthcare system is completely log jammed and there are literally no more beds and no more staff available. This basically what Italy is staring at, currently.
"It's like a rather bad influenza."