I guess we should stop talking about mortality rates, because it seems to confuse the issue.
COVID-19 currently has an estimated hospitalization rate of somewhere between 5-15% and a median hospital stay of 10 days. Multiply that by a relatively modest population infection rate of, say, 40%, compare it to the reality of 2.8 hospital beds per 1,000 people (that seems to be roughly the right number for both US and Canada), and you start seeing problems.
In comparison, a influenzas have hospitalization rates in the ballpark of 0.05% for adults with no known conditions. Covid-19 is literally a hundred times worse.
The high hospitalization rate is why hospitals are overflowing in Italy, and why governments need to take extreme measures now. Tons of people will get sick and then get over it, but it makes all the difference in the world whether everyone gets sick at the same time or not.
Overflowing hospitals also mean the mortality rates go way up. In Italy it's now around 5-8%
Since percentages are rough for people to get a grip on, let's put it in dice rolls. The mortality rate for hospitalized patients is roughly 15%, and the hospitalization rate is something like that too.
Basically everybody who gets infected rolls two dice, and if you roll snake-eyes you die. (Snake-eyes is 2.77%, so this really is fairly close.)
Middle-aged healthy people get three dice (better hope you don't roll for an underlying condition you didn't know about), young people get four, but if you're over 80, you only get one die.
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