'Rona-related Isolation Did No Good

This from no less than the BBC, mouthpiece organ of a government that loved its lockdowns:

There is no evidence that shielding benefited vulnerable people during the Covid pandemic, according to a study.

Swansea University compared 117,000 people shielding in Wales with the rest of the population of three million.

The study found deaths and healthcare usage were higher among shielding people than the general population.

The Welsh government said shielding was introduced on medical and scientific advice and it will continue to review evidence from the pandemic.

The study also found the Covid rate was higher among those shielding - 5.9% compared to 5.7%.

The researchers said the data raised questions about whether the policy worked.

They concluded that a "lack of clear impact on infection rates raises questions about the success of shielding, and indicates that further research is required to fully evaluate this national policy intervention"...

Speaking to BBC Radio Wales, Prof Helen Snooks, who led the research, said: "If shielding was going to be effective in reducing deaths and serious illness from Covid, then it really needed to reduce the infection rate, but unfortunately we didn't find evidence of that in the study."

Here comes the biggie:

Prof Snooks also emphasised that the shielding group was "a lot sicker than the non-shielding group".

"There were more deaths and there were more hospital admissions. We are, at this point, thinking that perhaps it was impossible to shield people effectively when there was such a high level of healthcare transmission at that time," she said.

"For a particular person, it may have been the best thing to do. What we evaluated was the policy of writing to people and recommending very strongly that they stay at home. It wasn't underpinned at that time by any evidence."

"It wasn't underpinned at that time by any evidence."  Those of us who said that a few years ago were blood-libeled.

"It was sort of made up at the time and implemented."

Given that no one could provide any evidence, of course it was made up.  

It wasn't anti-mask people like me who were anti-science, who made this a totalitarian "with us or against us" issue, who damaged the credibility of public health officials.  It was the the people who "made it up at the time" who did these things.

#### them, including this one.

Update:  Even Nate Silver, now formerly of FiveThirtyEight, says this:

Nate Silver blasted COVID-era closures of churches while other public spaces, such as museums, were permitted to operate with fewer restrictions.

“It’s kind of crazy (and tells you a lot about who was writing the restrictions) that churches in some jurisdictions were subject to more restrictions than museums!” Silver, the data journalist and founder of the FiveThirtyEight statistical analysis news site, tweeted.

“Not even attempting to follow any sort of epidemiological principles.”

Yeah, pretty much.  And Nate Silver is no rightie.