Nova Scotia’s legislature is finally sitting today under new premier Iain Rankin, after former premier Stephen McNeil couldn’t be bothered getting the house back to work for the entirety of the pandemic. (McNeil’s bullshit one-day opening in December absolutely doesn’t count as democracy in action.) Unfortunately the coronavirus is back to work, too, after taking yesterday off. Today the province is reporting five new cases of COVID-19.
“Three of the cases are in Central Zone and the other two are in Western Zone,” says the provincial update to media. “They are all close contacts of previously reported cases.” Nova Scotia now has 26 active C19 patients, after three people recovered since yesterday’s report.
Speaking of recoveries, someone whose C19 symptoms were bad enough to require hospitalization has been released from the hospital, so there’s currently only one C19 patient in hospital across the province. That great news is diminished because the patient is in intensive care. Every time we ask if they are the same person who’s been in the ICU since January 30, the province refuses to say, leaving us simply hoping that whoever it is, they recover soon and safely.
Accord to today’s update, provincial labs completed 2,841 tests Monday, very slightly up from the 2,768 reported for Sunday. The average over the last week is more than 4,600 tests per day—bolstered by the provincial pandemic record of almost 7,000 tests last Wednesday.
In vaccinations, 787 doses were put into arms yesterday. That’s about one third of the nearly 2,300 jabs performed last Wednesday (which was apparently a very busy day). Nova Scotia is reporting a stockpile of about 23,000 doses on hand today, a huge amount—just over 40,000 vaccines have been given out since December 16—ruling out supply concerns as a likely excuse for the injection effort to be moving slowly. And those 23,000 vaccines are separate from another 35,000 expected to arrive this week. Maybe we need for Wednesday to arrive before things start moving quickly.
Where Nova Scotia’s COVID-19 cases are on Tuesday
| HEALTH ZONE & NETWORK | NEW CASES | CLOSED CASES | ACTIVE CASES |
|---|---|---|---|
| Western zone totals | 2 | 0 | 3 |
| Yarmouth | – | – | – |
| Lunenburg | – | – | – |
| Wolfville | 2 | – | 3 |
| Central zone totals | 3 | 2 | 18 |
| West Hants | – | – | – |
| Halifax | 1 | – | 4 |
| Dartmouth | – | – | 3 |
| Bedford | 2 | 2 | 9 |
| Eastern Shore | – | – | – |
| Northern zone totals | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| Truro | – | – | 1 |
| Amherst | – | – | 2 |
| Pictou | – | – | – |
| Eastern zone totals | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| Antigonish | – | – | – |
| Inverness | – | – | 1 |
| Sydney | – | 1 | 1 |
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. We use a dash (-) instead of a zero (0) in the health network numbers to make the table easier to read.
This article appears in Mar 1-31, 2021.
