They give a "cough" incidence of 70.8% and a acute respiratory distress syndrome incidence of 14.8% in their paper. Meaning even a lot of people diagnosed with the infection show no respiratory symptoms, let alone severe ones. I therefore wouldn't dismiss the possibility of a high number of unreported cases, where people didn't develop any major symptoms and thought it was a cold or flu if they noticed symptoms at all.

Since the common cold is caused by coronaviruses a decent chunk of the time, I'm not sure it's even inaccurate for someone with a non-severe case of covid-19 to conclude that they have a cold.

Maybe that's the tricky part that helps it spread. Having a cold isn't enough to stop most people from going out in public. In my experience among people I know in the US and Canada, having a mild cold isn't enough for people to stay home from work.

But while a covid-19 infection might really be just a cold to a large chunk of people who get it, it's unusually deadly to a non-trivial percentage of people as well.

are the flu stats verified like the ones for this infection? or is the flu estimated among the population with a rougher method? For now I bet that there are a lot of people positive that are not being tested, in Italy they discovered a patient 1 only because they were "luky", and began testing a lot of people finding many positive cases.

the mortality rate of this is highly skewed because of shortage of test kits