Keep in mind that there are multiple elements to risk: mortality (deaths), morbidity (general diseased or injured state, also incidence or prevalence), infectiousness, detectability, rate of transmission, long-term health consequences, social & economic impacts.

Regards COVID-19:

The COVID-19 situation is changing rapidly. Since this disease is caused by a new virus, people do not have immunity to it, and a vaccine may be many months away. Doctors and scientists are working on estimating the mortality rate of COVID-19, but at present, it is thought to be higher than that of most strains of the flu.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

Comparing with other diseases:

Mortality rate for SARS was 10%, and for MERS 34%.

    Virus Death Rate
    Wuhan Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV): 2%*
    SARS: 9.6%
    MERS: 4%
    Swine Flu: 0.02%

The case fatality rate with seasonal flu in the United States is less than 0.1% (1 death per every 1,000 cases).

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...

https://smw.ch/article/doi/smw.2020.20203

Worldometers doesn't seem to say: How is North Carolina defining a covid-19 death?

At the moment the cumulative deaths to covid-19 appear to be doubling every 3 days. In some places it's less than 3 days.

That means in 21 days we'd expect to see just over 4000 total covid-19 deaths in North Carolina.

So in 21 days the number of deaths will be 4000, while Belgium with a similar population is at almost 1500 currently. That sounds rather unlikely given that the population in Belgium is also older than in North Carolina.

21 days ago Belgium was at 4 deaths, two doublings away from 33. They were at 30-40 total deaths 16 days ago, now they are at ~150 daily, total doubling every ~4 days.

so going from 30 to a few thousand in 21 days is what is happening. Can NC avoid that? Maybe, but I wouldn't bet on it personally.

Now half of the 21 days have passed and NC have officially registered 117 deaths, so they thankfully won’t reach 4000 deaths in the remaining 10 days.

Data from New York points to Hypertension and Diabetes in the elderly as the main cause of Corona deaths, that is something the US government should focus on, source: https://eu.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/politics/2020...

It all depends on how well the very old and those with other chronic illnesses will be protected, as they are the ones at risk. The development for NC can be followed at https://www.ncdhhs.gov/divisions/public-health/covid19/covid....

This article does a good job of explaining which age groups are susceptible to Corona virus: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/1/21203198/coronavirus-deaths-us-...

To put things into perspective, in the flu season 2017/18, Germany had 25,100 deaths (source: https://thegermanyeye.com/flu-vaccination-penultimate-wave-w...) while they currently have registered 1,584 deaths due to Corona virus. So yes Germany has probably saved some with the current measures, but should we then close down the society each year to combat the common flu as well ?