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 describes the situation. "The trend is hitting both highly vaccinated areas like Western Europe, the United States and Israel, and less-vaccinated nations of Africa and southeast Asia."
Here's a detail from the Times' graph of new cases around the planet, the solid red line tracing the rolling 7-day average of infections through 2021. There is a peak at the start of January—the end of the global second wave of COVID—then another peak mid-April, showing where the third wave maxed out. Now as July comes to a close, cases are going up again, threatening to build into a fourth wave.
To help answer that question, The Coast created the following chart showing the rolling 7-day average of new COVID cases reported in Canada. The rolling or moving average is a useful way to show the trend despite daily reporting anomalies, which is vital here because British Columbia has never reported new cases on weekends, and other provinces including Nova Scotia are following suit in what is feeling like a post-pandemic summer—that area of low infections in July, where the world chart shows a virus resurgence.
Each province and territory's daily running average in 2021 is shown, stacked with all the others to give the country-wide picture. To isolate certain places, you can click the name(s) at the top of the chart to add or include them. We will update this chart regularly, hoping that Canada's post-third wave miracle recovery doesn't become a fourth-wave nightmare.