New and active cases  Vaccination rate  Nova Scotia’s third and fourth waves  Breakthrough infections  Canada’s fourth wave
NS passes New Brunswick
Nova Scotia—now a province with a population of one million—spent most of the pandemic with more COVID infections than neighbouring New Brunswick and its 800,000 or so residents. But at the end of November, after a run of high daily case counts, NB took the lead from NS. If this was a sign that the Blaine Higgs government simply couldn’t contain COVID as effectively as premier Tim Houston and Nova Scotia, it was short-lived. Between X-Ring-related superspreading and omicron’s colonization of Atlantic Canada, today Nova Scotia reclaimed the east coast coronavirus crown, with 477 new cases pushing its pandemic total to 10,898 infections, compared to New Brunswick’s cumulative count of 10,554 cases since its first case in March 2020. Track the rising and falling cases yourself with this chart.
476 cases, another new record
For seven straight days, Nova Scotia has reported ever-increasing numbers of new infections. There were 114 cases Monday, then 127 Tuesday and 178 Wednesday. Thursday and Friday brought 287 and 394 COVID cases respectively, each of those days setting a new record for most cases announced in a day. Yesterday, Saturday, broke the record again, with 426 cases.
Now Nova Scotia is reporting 476 new cases on Sunday, the province’s latest infection record. With luck this record will last longer than 24 hours, but it doesn’t exactly feel like we have this kind of luck right now.
“There are 333 cases in Central Zone, 82 cases in Eastern Zone, 43 cases in Northern Zone and 18 cases in Western Zone,” the province says. “Due to delays with data entry into Panorama (public health’s case management system), the number of positive cases being released today are lab results, not Panorama results. This continues to better reflect the situation on the ground.”
The lack of Panorama data has been Nova Scotia’s reality for more than a week, and it means the province has not been able to give any data around the number of people who have recovered from the disease during that time. And THAT means there’s been no official count of active cases of COVID. To give some sort of context while the province can’t, The Coast has been adding each day’s new cases together to arrive at a maximum caseload, which we report with an asterisk. As in, there are currently 2,543* active cases in Nova Scotia.
This number is the best we can do given the information the province is providing, but there have almost certainly been hundreds of recoveries over the past week, so this number is surely higher than “the situation on the ground” as the province puts it.
Whenever we do get caseload information from the province, if it’s anywhere near the neighbourhood of 2,543* it will establish a new peak, not just for this current fourth wave but for the entire pandemic. The highest confirmed caseload during the third wave was 1,655 cases, reported May 10. During the first wave, the peak caseload was 466 active cases on April 19, 2020. The highest point in Nova Scotia’s mild second wave was 142 active cases, December 1, 2020.
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 18, 2021.
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COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Monday, Dec 20
COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Tuesday, Dec 21
COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Wednesday, Dec 22
This article appears in Dec 9-29, 2021.
