A hazard rate can be thought of as a patient's one day probability of mortality. A hazard ratio is a ratio of two hazard rates, so 1.25 would mean that people in one group were dying at a 1.25x rate relative to a comparison group.
I'd quibble slightly with the interpretation of the Hazard Ratio (or rate) here and say that it's more like "the instantaneous relative risk (or probability, if you like) of the event of interest [in this case mortality but not necessarily] between those with confirmed coronavirus and those without it, given that both groups have survived until time t and holding [set of covariates of interest, e.g. race, age, etc] constant."
Don't mean to sound like a pedant here even though it totally reads that way. I figured with enough epidemiology in the news these days, people may see a lot of "Hazard ratios" or "Cox regression" or "survival analysis" and be at risk of some confusion. I work with these concepts and I get tripped up myself sometimes.
