The mortality rate for influenza depends on which numbers you use.
Because the number of people who get sick from flu every year is so large as to be impossible to measure directly, the CDC uses mathematical modeling to estimate the number of people who a) get symptomatic flu; b) seek medical care for flu; c) are hospitalized for flu ; d) die from flu.
So, the mortality rate depends on which number you use as the denominator (is it # of deaths vs everyone who gets sick? sees an MD for flu? requires hospitalization?) and how you think that compares to coronavirus numbers.
Most likely the "total cases" of reported coronavirus are most comparable to either b or c. This is because without PCR based testing, you have no way of knowing if your upper resp. infxn is flu, coronavirus, or one of a million other viruses out there. You will not get PCR based testing unless you seek medical care, so the "denominator" for these stats is probably a big under-estimate of total patients actually sick with the virus (i.e. the current number of 12,000 mostly represents those sick enough to require care).
If we accept that the mortality rate for coronavirus is probably based on a total case # that represents a a mix of people who present for medical care (b) and those who require hospitalization (c), a more comparable mortality rate for influenza is between 7% and 0.2% (based on most recent preliminary flu season data for 2018-19, found
here).
I will say that this new coronavirus has spread more rapidly than SARS, which is an interesting development. We'll see what happens in the long run but I am still not freaking out. It is still not anywhere near the 2009 H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic in terms of overall # of cases (infected 61 million people in USA alone) and also still very unlikely to kill nearly as many Americans this year as regular influenza.