It's important to remember that SARS was a lot more deadly that COVID-19. I am not at all surprised such a high percentage of people suffered long term lung damage given how virulent it was. Case fatality was somewhere around 10%.
I'm curious if there was widespread serology testing to get to that number with the original SARS. That's in the ballpark of what the early SARS-COV-2 research (15%) showed until we realized there were asymptomatics and people who don't go to the hospital (because they aren't severe) and that numbers drawn from the hospitalized were not representative. If that number was just pulled from hospitalizations because we shut SARS down before we studied it as closely, it makes me wonder if the mortality rates are similar.
There was not widespread serology testing but subsequent analysis has the WHO pegging the fatality rate at about 3% (as opposed to the 10% from the time of the outbreak itself).
We didn't really shut SARS down so much as it seemed to have shut itself down, conventional epidemic control measures were enough to contain it and it was not quite easily transmissible enough to sustain itself in the wider population without being allowed to gain a real foothold undetected first.
That last point would be why you would not expect (and I would think it is impossible) to find that at the end of the day COVID-19 will be anywhere near as deadly as SARS. We have strong evidence that it takes truly extraordinary measures to suppress this new virus at a rate that will in fact eliminate it from a population when compared to SARS. SARS simply didn't spread that widely because if it did that would directly contradict the relative ease of its containment.
