Note: After weekly updates throughout 2022, this page is no longer being updated. The following charts are a record of Nova Scotia's COVID activity for the year; for the latest numbers in 2023 go to this page.
In the beginning—Nova Scotia's first cases of COVID-19 were reported on March 15, 2020—the province was diligent about sharing pandemic information with the public. Every 24 hours the province would collect the latest information, write the numbers into a report, then actively push that report out to the public via press release. For the longest while, even when the disease slowed down, the province’s reporting didn’t. On July 23, 2021, the province started taking weekends off, but remained committed to keeping the public informed with five reports per week.
Then a new political leader took over, and it became clear pretty quickly that he was committed to pretending the pandemic was over. It was as if he wanted Nova Scotians to stop caring about their own health and start caring about the economy instead, going out to eat and shop and travel like the before times. So, on March 10, 2022, the province reduced its COVID reporting to one press release per week. A few months later, on July 4, it switched to one report a month. This decline in reporting happened even after the disease mutated into the highly transmissible omicron form, and infections and deaths increased to unprecedented levels in Nova Scotia.
Luckily the province is maintaining its COVID data dashboard. This public source of information is updated on Thursdays, but its information isn’t actively pushed out to Nova Scotians by provincial communications professionals. So The Coast created this page of infographics to make the info more accessible—easy to find, easy to understand (hopefully), easy to see in the full pandemic context. We’ll update these charts and graph when the dashboard updates.
The page is broken into two sections: Graphs dating back only to the start of 2022, which give the recent context since omicron’s arrival in late 2021, and graphs dating to March 2020 for the full pandemic picture.