This 5% rate may be true, but it is a false data point. Unless it has change in the last two weeks over 42% of deaths were associated with nursing homes (see Forbes article I posted then).
Overall the statistics show that it is a bad flu season except for this class of people. Isolate those class of people and put in proper controls there and this too will pass
I think this keeps getting stated, but I'm not sure it's true at all.
Remember, the flu ALSO disproportionately kills the old and those with comorbid health factors. So if you want to figure out how this affects "a class of people" relative to the flu, you have to factor that in.
For example, I'm 41 years old, healthy, with no known heart or respiratory issues. My risk of mortality to the flu is extremely low. Much lower than the typical flu mortality rates in the 0.10-0.15% range. Because that 0.10-0.15% range for the flu includes the much more severely affected populations.
I suspect, although I don't have the data to back this up, that COVID-19 is significantly higher mortality for people in the "low-risk" age/health groups than the flu. That doesn't mean it's high, but let's not act like this is "just like the flu".
This thing has already killed 2x as many people in the US than the worst flu season in the last decade, and is rapidly approaching 4x the annual average.
So even with the data point that 42% of deaths were nursing homes,
that still leaves more deaths than the worst flu season in the last decade.
If you take the data point that's been bandied about here that ~80% of all deaths are in people over 65, that still leaves ~25,000 deaths. The average flu season over the last decade is 37,000 deaths, and that includes people over 65,
who account for between 70 and 85% of flu-related deaths as well.
So if you assume an average of 37,000 flu deaths per year,
and the low end of 70% of those deaths are above 65 years old, that leaves 11,100. If you take the worst flu season in the past decade of 61,000 deaths and extract out those over 65, that leaves 18,300.
So at 25,000 deaths to people under 65, we're already around 2.5x worse than a typical flu season, and around 1.5x as bad as the worst flu season in the last decade. And that's in the span of three months with infection rates not going away by any stretch.
This is not the flu!