It hasn't worked - literally nothing had qualitatively changed since day 1 when I said that exactly this would happen. All we have is better testing methods and a ravaged economy, yet fundamentaly we are at square zero.
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.
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)
$500m? $1b? $100b?
Just for comparison about 80 young Australians died from suicide this week alone.
Therefore, 100 lives would be worth about a billion dollars.
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).