Blanket Restrictive Measures in the Czech Republic During the COVID-19 Pandemic – A Trade-Off Concept Application

In early 2020, many widespread restrictive measures were introduced worldwide in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These measures entailed high socio-economic costs, which have been largely overlooked due to political motivations and the difficulty of their measurement. One of them is the negative impact of widespread restrictive measures on life expectancy due to the limited school attendance and the negative impact of restrictions on the population's health status. In this paper, we use our own structural model based on the trade-off analysis method. The research compares the lost years of life in the situation of the existence of restrictive measures and, on the contrary, the situation of a complete absence of these measures. We use data from the Czech Republic between February 2020 and October 2021. Our article concludes that the number of lost years of life is many times higher when widespread restrictive measures are implemented in all considered scenarios. These findings should be considered when making further decisions on applying widespread restrictive measures in the Czech Republic.