New research shows that the coronavirus may kill between 5 and 10 people per 1,000 infections. That means the fatality rate hovers between 0.3% and 1.5% of people infected, making it more lethal than the seasonal flu, but not as deadly as Ebola, SARS and other recent emerging infectious diseases.

The reason it’s actually killing more people than the other viral diseases is that COVID-19 is highly contagious.

“It’s not just what the infection-fatality rate is. It’s also how contagious the disease is, and COVID is highly contagious,” Dr. Eric Toner, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an expert in pandemic preparedness, told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s the combination of the fatality rate and the infectiousness that makes this such a dangerous disease.”

Already the disease has claimed the lives of over 609,000 people globally with nearly 25% of the fatalities in the U.S. Statistically, it has killed 4.2% of confirmed cases, well over the estimated fatality rate researchers suggest after analyzing data from 26 studies. According to the Journal, the discrepancy lies in the number of unconfirmed cases. Often people with mild symptoms of COVID-19 go undetected. Officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a nationwide survey and found that for every known case of COVID-19, approximately 10 went unrecorded.

While SARS, MERS and Ebola are much deadlier diseases, with fatality rates ranging between 10 to 15%, according to the Journal, the death toll has been far less. For example, SARS and MERS killed 774 and 858 people respectively while Ebola claimed the lives of 11,300 people globally.

Experts caution that fatality rates for COVID-19 vary for different age groups. Researchers from the U.S. and Switzerland analyzed data from the city of Geneva and found that people over the age of 65 had a whopping 5.6% fatality rate.

Healthcare experts also worry about the long-term consequences of COVID-19. Some sufferers have serious complications that continue to plague them long after becoming infected with the disease.

“There’s a narrative I think a lot of people have that you get the disease or you die, or your fine. And that’s not true,” Dr. Toner told the Journal. “There’s a large range of healthcare consequences for people who get severely ill, not just death.”