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  Nova Scotia’s third and fourth waves  Breakthrough infections  Canada’s fourth wave
Chasing New Brunswick past 10,000 cases
It was just a few weeks ago that New Brunswick passed Nova Scotia in infections diagnosed during the pandemic. But recent days of skyrocketing cases in NS have closed the gap. Nova Scotia blew past the awful milestone of 10,000 COVID cases today, arriving at 10,421 confirmed infections since cases first started being counted in 2020. As of Saturday’s reporting, New Brunswick is at 10,446 total infections, just 25 ahead of NS. The following chart tracks the inter-provincial totals.
A record 426 new cases
Today Nova Scotia is reporting the most new COVID infections that it has ever had in a day, in the entire two-year history of this stupid pandemic. More cases than the first wave in early 2020, when the world was just a confused panic and we couldn’t even imagine a vaccine might be possible. More cases in a day than any other point in the second or third or our ongoing fourth wave.
Two years into this nightmare, when 10,000 Nova Scotians have already had the disease and more than 80 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated, we just set a new infection record: 426 new cases. This is such a garbage disease.
Of course Nova Scotia is not alone; the omicron variant is powering never-before-seen case surges in places across the planet. And there’s a lot of hope that what omicron gained in infection ability over the delta variant, it lost in its power to make people very sick. Certainly Nova Scotia has not yet experienced a wave of hospitalizations to mirror this towering wave of cases, and there are promising numbers coming out of South Africa, where omicron was first identified, that its strain of sickness is more mild than delta’s. But then other numbers suggest it packs a punch to rival delta.
The trouble is the world has only known omicron for three weeks and a day, and the jury is out on what its effects will be. It’s going to take more time to find out how much hope we dare to have.
Nova Scotia’s COVID data dashboard continues to be overwhelmed by the number of new cases being reported by provincial labs, so there is no information available about gender and age of the new COVID patients, and also no sense of how many people have recovered from the disease lately or what the current official caseload is. In the absence of figures on recoveries, The Coast is simply adding today’s new cases to the running total, to give a sense of the maximum size of the caseload. The actual figure is doubtless smaller, as throughout the pandemic people have constantly been recovering, but we don’t have the numbers from the province to confirm how much smaller. Therefore we use an asterisk when we say that, according to the information the province is able to province, there are 2,067* active cases.
According to the Saturday report from the province, today’s 426 new cases are spread around Nova Scotia as follows: 296 cases in Central zone, 70 in Eastern, 35 Northern and 25 Western.
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.
jump back to the top
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.
jump back to the top
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.
jump back to the top
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.
jump back to the top
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.
jump back to the top
Click here for yesterday’s COVID-19 news roundup, for December 17, 2021.
Related Stories
COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Friday, Dec 17
COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Thursday, Dec 16
COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Wednesday, Dec 15
COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Monday, Dec 20
COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Tuesday, Dec 21
This article appears in Dec 9-29, 2021.
