It's always going to be difficult to estimate the death rate from Covid given the different standards of reporting from various countries, coupled with the issue that the death rate in the West is almost certainly being over reported whilst the infection rate is being under reported.

The CDC has estimated the crude infection fatality rate to be 0.7%, ultimately this doesn't matter in relation to the risk to young people, as it is virtually accepted by all that the infection fatality rate for the young is significantly below the crude 0.2% rate estimated by Professor Ioannidis.

https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/...vidupdate.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...197?via%3Dihub

Absolutely normal in those doses. I was on that regime, per prescription, for several years, although I didn't always use that much, particularly not the paracetamol.

But the idea of a High Pain Tolerance is a bit of a red herring TBH. It's not about how much you can take, but how much you actually feel. There are various syndromes including one named fibromyalgia that are used to categorise people who feel a lot of pain all the time, without any clear cause, and it seems likely that the brain has somehow reset its sensitivity to stimuli and somehow perceives pain signals either when they're not actually being generated by sensory organs or that are somehow amplified and perceived by the brain as much stringer than they are.

Sadly I've been in this category for a number of years, and often need to take painkillers, at well below the doses discussed above, just to be able to function normally. The irony being that I don't actually feel like I'm in pain most of the time, as I'm just used to pain levels that previously might have been up to 3-4 out of ten as being a base line. So in a sense my pain tolerance is high, i.e. I don't notice the pain, but the effect on the body, particularly via mechanisms like being unable to sleep properly and general tiredness, is every bit as great as if I were feeling it all the time. I often take a couple of paracetamol at night to help me sleep, even though I'm not actively feeling like something is hurting more than normal.

What's he doing on the fly, the poor thing? Can't he WFH like everybody else!?!

KiGa is only 2 years, vs 3 for the school "Stufe" (e.g. grades 1-3), by children attending its overweight in early March is even bigger than it appears at a glance.

A peer reviewed paper has come to the conclusion that the benefit of the vaccines may not be worth the risk. The paper places the risk from Covid and the vaccines in the same order of magnitude.

The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations—We Should Rethink the Policy

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/693/htm

The conclusion from the above paper:

5. Conclusions
The present assessment raises the question whether it would be necessary to rethink policies and use COVID-19 vaccines more sparingly and with some discretion only in those that are willing to accept the risk because they feel more at risk from the true infection than the mock infection. Perhaps it might be necessary to dampen the enthusiasm by sober facts? In our view, the EMA and national authorities should instigate a safety review into the safety database of COVID-19 vaccines and governments should carefully consider their policies in light of these data. Ideally, independent scientists should carry out thorough case reviews of the very severe cases, so that there can be evidence-based recommendations on who is likely to benefit from a SARS-CoV2 vaccination and who is in danger of suffering from side effects. Currently, our estimates show that we have to accept four fatal and 16 serious side effects per 100,000 vaccinations in order to save the lives of 2–11 individuals per 100,000 vaccinations, placing risks and benefits on the same order of magnitude.

And yet, Covid deaths are down and ICU units are no longer packed to the brim with COVID patients. How does one explain that?

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Faith isn't about everything turning out okay. Faith is about being okay no matter how things turn out.

I don't think there's any debate as to whether the vaccines are effective or not, it's more the point that vaccines need to be effective AND safe. The more data that comes out, the more questionable the second part is, certainly for people who are young/middle aged and healthy.

So, worries for healthy people. Common people drinking and smoking don't have to worry about that. When you read the obituaries, only the good die young

It seems to be general consensus by now that, given enough time, you get immunised against covid anyway, either by vaccination or by natural infection. The result should be immunisation above herd immunity level, which is expected to be at around, or somewhere above, 75% of any population. That assumes unlimited time, or sufficiently long however long that needs to be.

On the other hand any study will limit the observation by time, that's an inherent necessity. An additional reason in this case seems likely to be that the "environmental" threat, i.e. that of natural infection, can't change too much during the observed time, lest the data from the start aren't comparable to those from later stages. For instance if the study had observed Israel's entire vaccination campaign, that change would probably have been too large, thus the additional likely reason to limit the scope by time.

However, the result of that time-limit is that the first assumption doesn't apply, simply because the virus hasn't been allowed enough time to work its way through the population.

The consequence is that the measured benefit (i.e. avoided infections and deaths) considered by the study is far too low.

looking at official data at covid19.admin.ch:
- deaths were down also last summer, without the vaccine.
- ICUs were never really "packed to the brim"