Why Coronavirus is riskier than the seasonal flu?
Summary: coronavirus is deadlier, more contagious ,and has no vaccine or population immunity meaning it will likely spread through a chunk of world population, kill millions of older and medically compromised people, as well as cause economic and social upheaval in the world. 
coronavirus is much more contagious than seasonal flu with an R0 that is almost 3 times greater: 1.3 vs 3 meaning it will infect many more people
Case fatality rate for flu is 0.1 to 0.6 percent and although difficult to know exactly for for coronavirus it's estimated 2.3% (according to Chinese CDC which most likely under-reports) which makes it 5x-20x more deadly.
R0 is a measure of how contagious a virus is.
Because #coronavirus is so contagious some epidemiologists are predicting large portions of the world will be infected. I've seen estimates from 40 to 80 percent.
Case Fatality Rate = Deaths/Confirmed Cases
Coronavirus is about 5x to 20x more deadly than seasonal flu.
A common refrain is that #coronavirus has only killed a few thousand people, and that the flu kills hundreds of thousands, isn't the flu a much greater risk?
The answer is absolutely not.
As we've seen coronavirus infections grow exponentially, and we already have numbers showing that in the US we should expect a doubling of cases every week
This means that as coronavirus cases quickly spread, and some percentage result in deaths, the number of deaths will eventually eclipse that of the seasonal flu just as it has with SARS and MERS.
