I am confident permanent paralysis is up there if not worse than long COVID. My argument is that you cannot just put a blanket statement of which one is worse by looking at a single metric. Also, people are still performing a calculated risk, wether the risk is greater or smaller.
But very few people injured in car accidents are permanently paralyzed.
There are only 17k people per year who receive any kind of spinal cord injury, from all sources, not just cars.
That means you could even count all spinal injuries as a death!! If every person with a spinal injury somehow just died, it would still be a smaller problem than COVID deaths.
COVID would still be 7 or 8 times worse than these theoretically extra-deadly roads. Even if Long COVID didn't exist, the deaths alone would blow it out of the water.