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.
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.
The traffic injuries and fatalities are from Wikipedia [2].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/podcasts/the-daily/long-c...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
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.
What indeed? It's not 0. It's not infinite. But the cost of trying to reduce covid (and hence long covid) cases to 0 is infinite. It's a hard problem and entirely unclear where we should draw the line.
I truly do hope you (and all other affected) will get better.
Long covid is real and scary. So are cancer, heart attacks and car crashes, but it would be a really bad idea to skip a cost/benefit analysis of the possible counter measures available at societal level because of that.