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
The struggle to inform
Yes, the Nova Scotia COVID system is still being overwhelmed by all the new infections being diagnosed, and the high standards we’ve come to know and love during the pandemic are proving impossible to maintain. People who have the disease are being asked to do their own contact tracing, for example.
“All cases will be asked to contact their close contacts,” says today’s disease update from the province. “This may be the only contact a positive case has with public health. Detailed follow-ups are being prioritized to support contact tracing in schools, long-term care, healthcare facilities, correctional facilities, shelters and other group settings.”
And the province is still reporting new cases straight from the lab. “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.” This also continues to render the provincial data dashboard irrelevant, and leaves Nova Scotia in the lurch about how many people have recovered from the disease lately.
We also have no idea the actual caseload of active cases. One week ago, last Thursday Dec 9, was the last day the province announced recoveries and reported an active caseload. It was 194 active cases.
Since then, The Coast has simply been adding on the new cases to the reported caseload of 194 active cases, and calling that the number of active cases with an asterisk. We continue the practise today to try to give some context to the limited information the province is able to provide, but reiterate that it is the maximum number of active cases, as if not a single person recovered from the disease in the past week, when precedent tells us Nova Scotia has actually had several dozen—if not hundreds—of recoveries.
With that in mind, today’s active caseload is 1,247* active cases. That is a number approaching the third-wave peak of 1,655 active cases reported May 10, as you can see on the graph below, but again, it would certainly be lower if the province was able to report recoveries.
That rise to 1,247* active cases is powered by the 287 new infections being announced today. The Coast’s Lyndsay Armstrong explains why 287 cases both is, and isn’t, the most cases Nova Scotia has had in a single day during the entire pandemic.
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 15, 2021.
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This article appears in Dec 9-29, 2021.