The burden of Long Covid “so large as to be unfathomable”

My heart rate has never gone back to where it was and my breathing never returned to being fully "satiating".

Gone through the gamut of medical tests and everything is "normal".

US intelligence agencies have clearly stated that they do not believe that SARS-CoV2 was created by the Chinese government and that it should not be considered a biological weapon. While I understand why people doubt US intelligence sometimes, I can't see what incentive they would have to go easy on China in this case.

I also have no idea how you intend to hold a sovereign nation, let alone a borderline superpower, accountable for something that can't even be proved.

But, what I'm trying to say in my layman way is, I feel like I get sick differently after having covid. It's more frequent and lasts way longer. I'm currently at the tail end of a ~4 week long "cold" during which it felt like I'd improve/regress each week and it varied from my being completely functional to having fairly bedridden days. It was all just a "common cold", I think; who knows I might have had covid again (I'm not getting tested each time I get sick any more). These "colds" have been happening roughly every 3-6 months the last couple years since I got covid. Prior to that, I'd get sick only about once a year and sometimes 2-3 times without getting sick. Duration of sickness previously was typically 3-5 days, very rarely ever >1 week. Not sure if it's related, but the time of year is off too. I almost never got sick in the summer months before. Where I live it's been above 100F most of the past several weeks and typically I get sick in shoulder season months (Nov-Dec / Feb-Mar for my locale).

And no, even if it were created as part of vaccine or coronavirus research, that would not equate to it being a biological weapon. That's an absolutely unjustified leap. Do you know how virus research works? Clearly not. They still have smallpox viruses sitting around in labs. I don't know if there is any active research related to improving the smallpox vaccine, but if there were, and there were a release, in what way could you possibly classify vaccines as biological weapons?

But back to the original point: WHY? There is ample evidence that this particular lab had lax safety protocols that might have resulted in a leak of the virus. There is also evidence that similar viruses existed in the wild animal population of the area. They may or may not have been studying one of those viruses in the lab, but that alone doesn't prove where it first infected a human.

But say you have incontrovertible proof. What does that change?

People who died will remain dead. People with long COVID will remain ill. We can rattle sabers at China, but they're likely to continue to deny it was their fault. So what does happen? We can extrapolate from the past:

1. People of Chinese (or any east Asian) ancestry will be treated badly or even killed in twisted "revenge" fantasies of various idiots around the world.

2. The saber rattling could escalate to actual hot war, and more people would die.

3. Say I'm wrong and China does admit the lab screwed up. What then? They'll fire and/or execute people who were responsible. And...? It's not like they're going to pay compensation to everyone who lost a loved one around the world. They'll perform some political theater, and after a news cycle it will fade away.

I don't see an upside unless you're hoping for #3 and think that killing or jailing a few more people will somehow even the scales? Killing or jailing people for incompetence seems cruel and unusual to me. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.