The entire political establishment is in agreement on the need to enforce the pro-corporate policy of “forever COVID,” in which the working class and broad layers of society as a whole are condemned to unending waves of mass infection, death and debilitation with Long COVID.
This only matters if it incapacitates the host quickly enough that they don’t spread it, which isn’t necessarily closely related to its deadliness. In the 1980s, AIDS was a death sentence, but that didn’t make HIV less transmissible.