NOTE: This day is now over. Click for the latest on COVID-19 from The Coast. Or for an informative look back at Nova Scotia’s evolving pandemic response, keep on reading.

The X-Ring Xplosion of COVID cases is overwhelming Nova Scotia’s data dashboard, so until it is fixed we are suspending our map and charts that depend on dashboard data. In the meantime, you can still enjoy these infographics:
New and active cases    Vaccination rate    Nova Scotia’s third and fourth waves    Breakthrough infections    Canada’s fourth wave

394 new cases

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Get The Coast’s full report on this infection milestone here.

Three weeks of omicron

That’s it. Not three years. Not even three months. The world first heard about the omicron COVID variant just three weeks ago today, on Friday Nov 26. Its speedy international spread and rise in prominence to rival the delta strain is giving new meaning to the idea of going viral.

We are restricted

This morning at 9am, Nova Scotia officially took a step backward in its prolonged COVID reopening, going from almost-but-not-quite Phase 5 (the maximum level of being open and chill with the virus) back to Phase 4, essentially. Gathering limits for informal get-togethers are down from any 25 people to 20 people who are ideally in a social bubble. Masks need to be worn more often. And formal events have a reduced capacity.

Because it’s hard to keep track when things have been changing so quickly lately, these rules that came into effect Friday at 9am are the same restrictions that were announced by the premier and Doctor Strang at a COVID briefing on Monday.

Houstrang speaks

Premier Tim Houston and chief medical officer of health Robert Strang are giving a COVID-19 briefing today at 2pm. You can watch live at novascotia.ca/stayinformed/webcast and/or @nsgov on Facebook, or catch it later at the Nova Scotia government’s YouTube page.

Comparing active cases in the third and fourth waves

In December, the town of Antigonish became ground zero for an inter-provincial COVID outbreak due to a weekend of superspreader events connected to the annual presentation of X-Rings at St. Francis Xavier University. But how bad is the outbreak, really? The following chart lets you compare Nova Scotia’s active cases, dating from the third wave in April through the fourth wave and its infection Xplosion, using case data from provincial pandemic reports. The chart will be updated when provincial reporting allows.

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New and active cases visualized

Nova Scotia’s third wave of COVID grew in April, 2021, peaked in May (227 new cases in one day was the maximum) and subsided in June. On July 17, the province reached five active cases—its lowest level in more than eight months—and an election was called. So when it came time to reset The Coast’s chart comparing daily new cases with that day’s active caseload, in order to better reflect disease levels after the third wave, we started from July 17. Two months later, on September 14, the province formally announced the arrival of the fourth wave of COVID. The dark purple line tracks the rise and fall of daily new infections reported by the province; the green area is the province’s caseload. In mid-November, The Coast added a golden line to show the 7-day moving average of daily new cases, effectively a smoothed-out version of the purple line that puts the ups and downs into bigger context. Click or hover over any point on the graph and the detail for that moment will pop up. To focus on just some information, click the legend at the top left of the graph to hide or reveal that data set. Note: As of July 23, 2021, the province stopped updating case numbers on weekends. And you can click here for the version of this graph that includes the third wave and its May 10 crest of 1,655 active cases.

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Vaccination in the population

How many Nova Scotians already have one dose of vaccine? How many are fully vaccinated with two doses? And how close are we to the herd immunity goal of 75 percent of the province fully vaxxed? These questions are answered in our chart of the vaccination rate in Nova Scotia since the province started reporting these numbers in January 2021, breaking out people who’ve had a single dose separate from those who’ve had the full complement of two doses. (Here’s more information about the 75 percent target and what it will take to get there.) Note: The province doesn’t update vaccination numbers on weekends.

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Canadian cases in 2021

There was a point in July 2021, when the delta variant was causing an increase in COVID infections around the world, that Canada seemed safe from the fourth wave. By August, however, that point had passed, and case numbers around the country started to rise again. This graph charts the number of new infections every day in each province and territory, using the 7-day moving average to mitigate single-day anomalies (including a lack of weekend reporting in several jurisdictions including British Columbia and Nova Scotia). To focus on individual places, click the place names at the top of the chart to turn that data on or off.

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Breakthrough infections in Nova Scotia

On Fridays, the province’s daily COVID report includes statistics about COVID breakthroughs—infections, hospitalizations and deaths among people who are fully or partially vaccinated. The province reports its numbers as a cumulative total: all the breakthrough cases dating from March 15, 2021 to the latest update. The Coast does an analysis to break the information about new cases down by each weekly reporting period, in order to offer our readers the following unique view of the same information, so you can better understand the fluctuations in breakthrough infections as they happen. Note: Our bar chart only dates back to June because the province didn’t start this reporting until summer 2021.

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Click here for yesterday’s COVID-19 news roundup, for December 16, 2021.

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This article appears in Dec 9-29, 2021.

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