What is a life Worth?

I have no idea, but I do know that we have spent millions (and in some cases tens of millions) to save the life of a person that has gone missing. Unfortunately, in most cases these attempts may have located the missing person, but did not save their life. I realize that it may not be popular to view the recent pandemic in economic terms, but here goes. We have spent over $6 trillion over 15 months with the idea that it would assist aid the economy while we were saving lives. Where we failed was with our ineffective approach to containing the virus. The facts we that we spent more money per capita than countries like New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. At the same time all of these countries experienced less impact on their per capita GDP and higher levels of employment than the USA.

What is depressing is that, on average, these countries experienced COVID related per capita mortality rates that were about 1/20^th that of our country. We spent more to save fewer lives. What would have been worth to save over a half million lives. Assuming an arbitrary value of a million dollars per life it would be worth $500 billion. We spent a lot more than that and failed, in my opinion.