Today we are very excited to share our news that The Coast has been acquired by the Overstory Media Group. Since we founded The Coast with four other friends in 1993, we have seen so much change in our industry. With a feisty and committed team, we have been able to persevere and push through […]
Kyle Shaw
Loving the arrival of this mysterious climate event people are calling "spring".
Kyle was a founding member of the newspaper in 1993 and was the paper’s first publisher. Kyle occasionally teaches creative nonfiction writing (think magazine-style #longreads) and copy editing at the University of King’s College School of Journalism.
Posted inNews + Opinion
COVID keeps rising in Nova Scotia while pandemic info from the province is falling
The last time Nova Scotia issued its weekly COVID update, we discussed the two big things the report revealed. First, infections are up to the highest level of the whole pandemic. Second, it’s hard to make good comparisons of disease data when the province switches around the way it reports information. That was for the […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Nova Scotia just reported its most new COVID cases of the entire pandemic
Does everyone you know have COVID? It certainly feels like everyone has it. And given the latest pandemic numbers released by the province yesterday, there’s good reason for that feeling. During the entire pandemic, now into its third year, Nova Scotia has never had as many new cases reported as right now. Because the government […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Premier Houston’s bizarre new COVID video annotated by Twitter
Wednesday morning, the Nova Scotia government’s Twitter account released a two-minute video of premier Tim Houston and chief medical officer of health Dr. Robert Strang. Houston’s come under a lot of criticism lately for his handling of COVID, particularly because the government dropped most public health rules and stopped giving daily updates about the disease, […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Nova Scotia’s COVID-19 pandemic at 2 years old
Sunday, March 15, 2020, the provincial government’s media briefing room in downtown Halifax was packed with journalists and TV cameras. This was before social distancing and gathering limits. Before masks. It was even before COVID-19 had officially arrived in Nova Scotia—this press conference would be the disease’s coming out. True to the Shakespearean warning, Dr. […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Fully vaccinated Canada: animated national COVID vaccination tracker
To watch the race press the play button at the lower left of the chart. Click here for a larger version of the chart. Canada’s vaccine rollout started in mid-December 2020, and with the required couple weeks between jabs, it wasn’t until January 2021 that the first Canadians became fully vaccinated with two doses. To […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Canada vaccination uptake tracker to chart people with at least one dose of vaccine
To watch the race press the play button at the lower left of the chart. Click here for a larger version of the chart. “We are in a race between the variant and the vaccine,” Robert Strang said in April. Nova Scotia’s head public health official was referring to his province at the time, but he […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
6,000 cases in Nova Scotia, explained in 6 charts
Nova Scotia announced 31 new infections today, which is a below-average number on its own—the 31 are spread over Friday, Saturday and Sunday for about 10 infected per day. But with those cases the province has now reported a total of 6,030 COVID cases during the pandemic. In honour of passing the 6,000-infection milestone, The […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Phase 5 arrives Sept 15, but NB border restrictions return Wednesday
This story was updated August 29 to include a quote from Tim Houston making clear the province must reach 75 percent fully vaccinated to enter Phase 5. Phase 5 is scheduled to start Wednesday, September 15, Houstrang says. Monday afternoon, during their first provincial COVID briefing together, incoming premier-designate Tim Houston and chief medical officer […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
As the world struggles with delta, how’s Canada doing?
While Nova Scotians dance and Canada is getting ready to reopen international airports, the pandemic is rising in much of the world. “Around the globe, coronavirus infections have surged again, driven by the Delta variant, with daily case counts more than 40 percent higher than a month ago,” is how the New York Times starkly […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Nova Scotia’s slowing vax uptake hurts national rank
Newfoundland and Labrador has Canada’s best vaccination rate, at 74.3 percent of its population having at least one dose of vaccine. Nunavut, meanwhile, has the lowest rate in the country, with 54.4 percent vaccinated with at least one dose. These numbers are the latest from the federal government, released on Friday, July 9, for vaccinations […]