The problem was it was too quick: if you died of COVID, you were dead. You could be memory-holed and everyone would simply forget you and move on.
If you had Polio, though, you were paralyzed and stuck in a metal tube and kept alive.
Can’t forget your not-dead kid who lives in a tube, and thus it was treated as more of a thing that should be fought because there was a clear and visible reminder of what this disease was doing to everyone’s kids.
If COVID left a couple million people living in tubes, then we absolutely would have treated it differently, but it didn’t.
(Alternately, if COVID had killed 10 or 20 million people, we would have also treated it seriously: it just wasn’t sufficiently deadly OR left a wake of broken, but living, people.)
Depends what it costs, honestly.
If you can make fake-cow that tastes like actual cow and a pound of ground fake cow isn’t $7, consider me very interested.