There are six new COVID-19 infections in the province today, the most since the 10 cases reported Friday, February 26, which made Strankin implement the circuit breaker lockdown. But this six-case spike comes the day after lockdown ended early. Did the lockdown stop too soon? Should we be worried?
“The case count is a little higher today but it’s good to see that none of the new cases are from unknown sources,” says Iain Rankin, the premier part of Nova Scotia’s disease-fighting duo. “These numbers reinforce the importance of being tested and continuing adherence to public health guidelines.”
When Rankin talks about being comforted by infection sources, he means the transmission vectors for all of today’s cases are easily traced back to obvious, predictable, contained reasons—people travelling into Nova Scotia or being friendly with C19 patients. No cases are “under investigation” today as potential uncontrolled community spread.
“One case is in Eastern Zone and is related to travel outside Atlantic Canada,” says today’s report from the province. “One case is in Northern Zone and is a close contact of a previously reported case.”
The other four cases are all in the Central health authority zone. “One is related to travel outside Atlantic Canada,” the update says. “The other three cases are close contacts of previously reported cases.”
Compared to today’s six cases, Nova Scotia has eight C19 patients recover since yesterday, so the number of active cases dropped to 29. One more patient got out of the hospital (hooray!), leaving us with two people hospitalized, one of them sick enough to be in the ICU.
Provincial labs processed 4,404 tests yesterday, which is a lot, but is lower that the average of 5,334 daily tests seen over the last week of intensive testing. The province still wants to test everybody, whether they’re showing C19 symptoms or not.
“Nova Scotians are strongly encouraged to seek asymptomatic COVID-19 testing, particularly if they have a large number of close contacts due to their work or social activities,” says today’s report, as the reports have said every day lately. “Appointments can be booked at https://covid-self-assessment.novascotia.ca/, by choosing the asymptomatic option. Rapid testing pop-up sites continue to be set up around the province as well. More information on testing can be found at https://www.nshealth.ca/coronavirustesting.”
Today’s update doesn’t say how many vaccines were injected yesterday, continuing a pattern of vaccination information shutting down completely when weekends are involved.
Where Nova Scotia’s COVID-19 cases are on Saturday
| HEALTH ZONE & NETWORK | NEW CASES | CLOSED CASES | ACTIVE CASES |
|---|---|---|---|
| Western zone totals | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Yarmouth | – | – | – |
| Lunenburg | – | – | – |
| Wolfville | – | – | 1 |
| Central zone totals | 4 | 7 | 20 |
| West Hants | – | – | – |
| Halifax | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Dartmouth | 1 | 1 | 6 |
| Bedford | 2 | 3 | 9 |
| Eastern Shore | – | – | – |
| Northern zone totals | 1 | 0 | 4 |
| Truro | – | – | 1 |
| Amherst | 1 | – | 3 |
| Pictou | – | – | – |
| Eastern zone totals | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| Antigonish | – | – | – |
| Inverness | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Sydney | – | – | 3 |
The totals for the health zones (Northern, Eastern, Western, Central) may be different than the totals you’d get by adding up the numbers in the Community Health Networks that make up each zone, because the province doesn’t track all cases at the community network level. The zone totals reflect every case in the area; the community network numbers only show cases that can be localized to a region inside the bigger area. The names of the community networks here have been adapted/shortened for simplicity; click to download the province’s PDF map with the exhaustively complete network names. All data comes from the Nova Scotia COVID-19 data page.
This article appears in Mar 1-31, 2021.
