Actually to be accurate you need to specify which death rate is being referred to. From https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid:
In the media, it is often the “case fatality rate” that is talked about when the risk of death from COVID-19 is discussed.1 This measure is sometimes called case fatality risk or case fatality ratio, or CFR. But this is not the same as the risk of death for an infected person – even though, unfortunately, journalists often suggest that it is. It is relevant and important, but far from the whole story. The CFR is very easy to calculate. You take the number of people who have died, and you divide it by the total number of people diagnosed with the disease. So if 10 people have died, and 100 people have been diagnosed with the disease, the CFR is [10 / 100], or 10%. But it’s important to note that it is the ratio between the number of confirmed deaths from the disease and the number of confirmed cases, not total cases....
For instance, more than 10% of people with a cardiovascular disease, and who were diagnosed with COVID-19, died. Diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases, hypertension, and cancer were all risk factors as well, as we see in the chart. By comparison, the CFR was 0.9% – more than ten times lower – for those without a preexisting health condition.
The crude mortality rate The “crude mortality rate” is another very simple measure, which like the CFR gives something that might sound like the answer to the question that we asked earlier: if someone is infected, how likely are they to die? But, just as with CFR, it is actually very different. The crude mortality rate – sometimes called the crude death rate – measures the probability that any individual in the population will die from the disease; not just those who are infected, or are confirmed as being infected. It’s calculated by dividing the number of deaths from the disease by the total population. For instance, if there were 10 deaths in a population of 1,000, the crude mortality rate would be [10 / 1,000], or 1%, even if only 100 people had been diagnosed with the disease. This difference is important: unfortunately, people sometimes confuse case fatality rates with crude death rates. A common example is the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918. One estimate, by Johnson and Mueller (2002), is that that pandemic killed 50 million people.2 That would have been 2.7% of the world population at the time. This means the crude mortality rate was 2.7%. But 2.7% is often misreported as the case fatality rate – which is wrong, because not everyone in the world was infected with Spanish flu. If the crude mortality rate really was 2.7%, then the case fatality rate was much higher
WHO (2020)
Disease
Estimated case fatality rate (CFR)
SARS-CoV
10%
Venkatesh and Memish (2004)
Munster et al. (2020)
MERS-CoV
34%
Munster et al. (2020)
Seasonal flu (US)
0.1 to 0.2%
US CDC
Ebola
50%
40% in the 2013-16 outbreak
Shultz et al. (2016)
What we want to know isn’t the case fatality rate: it’s the infection fatality rate...The IFR is the number of deaths from a disease divided by the total number of cases. If 10 people die of the disease, and 500 actually have it, then the IFR is [10 / 500], or 2%.3,4,5,6,7 To work out the IFR, we need two numbers: the total number of cases and the total number of deaths. -https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid?country=~USA
Now from https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/09/26/what-is-the-death-rate-for-covid-19-coronavirus-what-this-study-found/#3bde630a5c46
For the overall non-institutionalized population in Indiana, the IFR came out to be 0.26 percent. In other words, for every 1000 people in the community who had gotten infected, an estimated 2.6 ended up dying. The average age at death was 76.9 years...The overall IFR from this Indiana study was a little lower than the 0.5 to 1 percent range reported by the World Health Organization (WHO), based on other studies.
And from https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/clarifying-the-true-fatality-rate-of-covid-19-same-as-the-flu-8148e38b9ab5 by Shin Jie Yong Sep 8 · 7
a person is more likely to become a case (symptomatic) when infected with SARS-CoV-2 than with the influenza virus. The main reason is that SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus in which little preexisting immunity exists, so a lot more infected people will get sick.
Even if the IFRs of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza might be the same, as some data may suggest, SARS-CoV-2 is more contagious with a basic reproductive number (R-naught) of 2.5. This means an infected person can pass the virus to two people or so, resulting in 2000+ infections after ten rounds of transmissions. The flu, by contrast, has an R-naught of 1.3, which equates to 56 infections after ten rounds.
The fact that Covid-19 kills more than flu is quickly evident by “the number of deaths that exceed what is seen in typical years.” Overall, a higher transmission rate leads to more infections and then more cases and, eventually, more deaths. The fact that Covid-19 kills more than flu is quickly evident by “the number of deaths that exceed what is seen in typical years,” the academic journal Nature reported in September. In other words, deaths from Covid-19 are not deaths that ‘would happen anyway’.
The CDC has changed the IFR values of Covid-19 into age-specific estimates, which are now very low at 0.003% for 0–19 years, 0.02% for 20–49 years, 0.5% for 50–69 years, and 5.4% for 70+ years.
But there seems to be no data on age-specific IFR of the seasonal flu. The WHO only stated that “the infection mortality rate (the number of reported deaths divided by the number of infections) will be lower. For seasonal influenza, mortality is usually well below 0.1%.” How much below 0.1% is unclear. Admittedly, comparing mortality rates between Covid-19 and the seasonal flu may lead to nowhere. Perhaps we should look at other metrics instead, such as R-naught and excess deaths.
The estimated IFR for people in their 70s is 11 times the rate for 50-to-69-year-olds, 270 times the rate for 20-to-49-year-olds, and 1,800 times the rate for people younger than 20. In the latter two groups, the estimated IFR is lower than the overall IFR for the seasonal flu. [https://reason.com/2020/09/29/the-latest-cdc-estimates-of-covid-19s-infection-fatality-rate-vary-dramatically-with-age/]