The best estimate I found was from May of this year. At the time they estimated somewhere between 7.7 and 23 million cases of long Covid in the US.

Compare that with 1.6 million people getting a cancer diagnosis every year, about 40 thousand traffic fatalities and 2.2 million injured in traffic accidents.

Some of the worst kind of long covid is neurological. I and others I know had non-trivial (10-25%) cognitive deficit for multiple months after covid. For some reason, I also experienced the same after receiving my latest bivalent booster, but for a much shorter period of time (1-2 weeks instead of 12).

There has been relatively little in the media about the cognitive/neurological costs of covid to our society. If you get covid and your "sickness" is over in a week or two and you go back to work but you've had 15 points knocked off your IQ for half a year, what is the true cost of that to an entire civilization when scaled up to the whole planet?

Given the choice between having had covid and living under an authoritarian regime for the last three years, I'd have chosen the latter.

> it would be a really bad idea to skip a cost/benefit analysis

Western leaders aren't doing any cost/benefit analysis at all - except to their political career.

We have a range of very low-cost, technological measures avaliable. For exampme upgrading schools with proper ventillation. We have scientific studies that show this would reduce likelihood of infection for everythint, from COVID to common cold. It would reduce CO2 concentrations in classrooms and help children be more alert and awake. There has been zero budget allocated to them.

In London I have seen UV sterilisation installed on handrails of the escalators, and ROI on that will be mostly zero.

Lives > Money

I have immuno-compromised and elderly family. They have to visit the post office, the passport office, the insurance, etc.

Every time they do, people are refusing to wear a simple mask and are putting them at risk. There is always a guy that is obviously ill and is coughing all over the place.

Like if you go to a nightclub ill, whatever, everyone is there by choice. But visiting a government establishments is a legal obligation.

Why is it that if you go into my house uninvited, fall onto a ditch and break your leg, I could be held responsible, but if I cought at your face on purpose to infect you, noone is at fault.

Why is it at least not a social norm to kick out sick and unmasked people from public institutions?