Ireland on Friday announced a staggered easing of coronavirus lockdown restrictions to allow some businesses to reopen and for families to gather ahead of Christmas.

Belgium will allow shops to reopen from December 1, Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said Friday, but the country’s semi-lockdown will remain in place to bring down coronavirus infections.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday he expects more than half of Canadians to receive a COVID-19 vaccine by next September after he came under criticism for saying Canadians won’t be among the first to get doses.

Concerns have been raised that the use of a common group of medications called RAS inhibitors could facilitate SARS-CoV-2 infection, impact COVID-19 disease severity and worsen prognosis. However, in a new nationwide registry-based study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, including almost 1.4 million patients, use of RAS inhibitors was not associated with increased risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19. The study has been published in the European Journal of Heart Failure.

The state of knowledge seemed clear: school education protects against dementia. Every school year is supposed to reduce the risk of developing dementia in later life by up to seven percent. Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) have shown quite some perseverance and have now refuted this causal connection. Their work is based on a school reform that extended schooling in Sweden 80 years ago. The American Journal of Epidemiology covers this in its current issue.