I'm going to suspect those going "oh it will be just like swine flu, nothing to worry about" did not have swine flu. I had swine flu. I was young, healthy and in my twenties and it completely knocked me out. I was off work about 3 weeks. Fortunately by habit I keep a lot of "just add water" food in because I genuinely couldn't manage more than staggering downstairs, adding boiling water and staggering back up. It was awful.
A 2% death rate is 1 in 50. In a disease we have no immunisation for that's huge. That is all the people who usually DON'T die of flu because we give them the flu jab. It's my 90 year old gran. It's my neighbour on chemo. It might even be my family member with hypothyroidism. It's every single person in the UK knowing someone who dies of it.
More troubling than that though isn't the death rate it's the infection rate. What percentage of the UK workforce do you think we can afford to have off work ill at once before there are serious repercussions? Not just doctors and nurses, but regular people. That's the guys who take your bins away, the guys who deliver food to Tesco, your kid's teacher, the people who dig graves. How many of those do you think can we have ill at once before that in itself starts causing health issues?
There are reasons governments take this seriously and it's not hysteria.