You can run the numbers yourself. You're not going to come out with different numbers with any sane assumptions. A high-filtration mask costs $1-$2. Multiply by 350 million people, and you're at $12B to give everyone a new mask every day for a year. You can do the same for everything else I listed.

An early, severe, global reaction, like China, would have prevented COVID from becoming endemic. That would have cost BILLIONS of dollars, and impacted perhaps TENS OF THOUSANDS or even HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people in the US.

Instead, we've got a million dead in the US, many times that worldwide, and are continuing a giant dumpster-fire with trillions of dollars. Not to mention several times that with long COVID.

And we learned no lessons.

As a footnote, as much as the top-level post was wrong, it shouldn't have been flagged. I'm so tired of sites filtering everyone they disagree with.