Interesting section below of an item in the Independents online news coverage, which I think puts the current situation in perspective. Some of the media coverage of the outbreak has been disgracefully designed to deliberately panic the public :-

‘Despite the obvious seriousness of the situation it is important to keep the threat in perspective (during the 2017-18 UK flu season there were 26,408 deaths and 1,692 in 2018-2019). The UK's chief medical officer Chris Whitty estimates a mortality rate for coronavirus of one per cent. (Other earlier estimates have been higher at between 2 to 3.4 per cent].
In comparison, SARS had a mortality rate of more than 10 per cent.’