There is an important win: A bunch of people who would have died are still alive.
That said, the right strategy is to focus on hammering the virus to zero quickly through old-school epidemiology techniques. If we had done so early, the problem wouldn't be this bad. It would have been expensive, but less-expensive than our present path.
The bright side of combating an exponential foe: Once you start to win, winning gets easier.
A lot of people that shouldn't and wouldn't have died are dead. Even more are unemployed, starving, homeless and in severe distress as a direct consequence.
I sincerely doubt that it would amount to a net win, after everything else and all the externalities get factored in (it's never done unfortunately)
Those are the effects of moving society online. New winners and losers will emerge. A strong social safety net is helpful transitioning the losers back to productive winners. This was going to happen over a longer period of time anyhow.
Medical decisions in the USA suggest that the statistical value of a “quality-adjusted life year” is ~$128,000 on average. Obviously the question of “life years” is critical in this context. Everyone would be in favor of sacrificing more to save healthy children than people who are 80+. (No one wants to see anyone die needlessly, but the children can live happy lives for another half-century.)
That's the value of an average life. Health economists at e.g. the NHS actually use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year, to account for the fact that e.g. an 80 year old has fewer years of life left than a 10 year old.
About zero, really. Unless some of those 80+ year olds are prominent scientists, etc.
The numeric value $1 billion means $1 billion worth of human labor or energy. The amount of this energy is finite, and it's around $80 trillions currently. We can multiply it by 10-100, the exact number doesn't matter, what maters is that it's not a lot bigger than $1 billion. Saying that saving a human life is worth any dollar amount, is same as saying that our society, all 7-something billion people, should spend all their energy on saving that one life.
A human body is really just a vehicle, like a car. When it approaches 80 yo mark, it's worth about nothing. It's just some people believe, with religious rigor, that they're bound to this car forever.
I don’t think experts honestly thinks you can hammer the virus to zero though based on our knowledge of human behavior.
Case in point, HIV has killed around 50 million over the past few decades, and we know exactly how it spreads, and it is quite easy to stop. If we can’t stop HIV, without a vaccine there is no way we can stop something airborne (which we now know SARS-CoV2 is).
That said, the right strategy is to focus on hammering the virus to zero quickly through old-school epidemiology techniques. If we had done so early, the problem wouldn't be this bad. It would have been expensive, but less-expensive than our present path.
The bright side of combating an exponential foe: Once you start to win, winning gets easier.