In the course of a bad but not severe influenza season, about one in ten are infected (morbidity), and, of those, one in one thousand or fewer die - mortality (sometimes a lot fewer, which gives the discrepancy in reported rates). And the overall population mortality is a magnitude give or take lower.
So 10% of the USA population is about 30 million. I saw some wiki thing that said flu hits between 1 million to 45 million people a year in the USA (quite the range!!!, but what does one expect from wiki).
So if 90,000 died from flu last year, with 30 million infected, that is a mortality rate of 0.3 percent.
Thanks for helping me understand this better.