It's not at all absurd. Napkin math: 1% fatality rate * 60% infection rate * 7.8 billion people = 46.8 million deaths. You can plug in all sorts of adjustments, but millions is totally plausible.

Or another way to look at it is that the US could easily see 100k deaths. [1] The us is about 1/20th of the world population, so scaling up we get 2 million deaths.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/world/coronavirus-live-ne...