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.
New and active cases Vaccination rate Canada’s fourth wave
Province, we have a Houstrang
The incoming premier and the ongoing top doc held their first COVID briefing today. Our full report is here, but the basics are:
1. inside Nova Scotia we are doing so well with vaccinations and low case counts that Phase 5 of reopening should start September 15, and
2. outside Nova Scotia the fourth wave of infections is only gaining in size (consult our national infection chart below), so the current NS border restrictions on travellers who aren't fully vaccinated will continue. Actually, they're becoming tighter, because New Brunswick and its current case surge are getting kicked out of the Atlantic travel bubble on Wednesday, and NB visitors who aren't fully vaxxed will face the same self-isolation and testing requirements as anyone from the west of Canada.
17 new cases and a Panorama glitch
Monday, August 23, 2021
Reopening status
Phase 4
New cases
17
New recoveries
Unknown
New deaths
Hopefully zero
Active cases
Unknown
Total cases in Nova Scotia during pandemic
5,973
Total COVID deaths
93 reported
"Due to a technical issue with Panorama, data for today Aug. 23 was not available at the time of reporting," says a note on the Nova Scotia C19 data dashboard. In the province's daily report for Monday, the missing info is spelled out: "The number of active cases, recoveries, hospitalizations, deaths and immunization data for today was not available at the time of reporting. The COVID-19 data dashboard will be updated once the data is available." (We checked the dashboard for the umpteenth time near midnight, and that data remained unavailable.)
So we are extremely sorry, but we can't tell you much about these 17 new cases. This is the most infections reported at once since the 17 cases June 8, on the tail end of the third wave when there were 171 active cases. Except this is the number for Friday, Saturday and Sunday combined, so it's more like an average of six cases per day—much less impressive. Remember, there were 10 new infections reported on Friday, and 41 active cases.
The province's report does say all 17 of the new cases are connected to previous cases or travel. "Eleven of the cases are in Central Zone," says the report. "Four cases are in Northern Zone" and two are in Western. The report also includes testing numbers, which hovered around 3,000 tests per day on Friday and Saturday, before exhibiting the standard Sunday drop to under 2,500 tests. The current daily average is about 2,900.
New—but not 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. The dark line tracks the rise and fall of new infections reported by the province; the green area is the province's caseload. Click or hover over any point on the graph and the detail for that moment will pop up. To focus on just new or active cases, 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. And today the province isn't reporting the number of active cases, so we have only added the data about new infections to the graph.
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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. And it didn't update the numbers today, either.
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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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Click here for the previous COVID-19 news roundup, for Friday, August 20, 2021.
