Before revision:  Social distancing measures are triggered by the number of infections, providing a dynamic feedback-loop which slows the spread of the virus. We estimate the total cost of several distinct containment policies incurring over the entire path of the endemic .
After revision:  An analytic solution is presented. The model reproduces official COVID-19 cases counts of a large number of regions and countries that surpassed the peak of the outbreak. A single unbiased feedback parameter is extracted from field data and used to formulate an index that measures the efficiency of containment policies (the CEI index). CEI values for a range of countries are given. For two variants of the controlled-SIR model, detailed estimates of the total medical and socio-economic costs are evaluated over the entire path of the endemic .