New and active cases Vaccination rate Nova Scotia’s third and fourth waves Breakthrough infections Canada’s fourth wave
Nine days of rising cases
Tuesday brings 522 new COVID infections to Nova Scotia. It’s the ninth day in a row that cases have risen, at the same time setting a brand-new record for most cases the province has ever had in a day. (The previous record was set yesterday, when there were 485 cases reported.)
Tuesday also brings a Houstrang briefing, and tighter restrictions on gathering announced by premier Houston and Doctor Strang, plus reports of outbreaks at the QEII health centre’s Halifax Infirmary site and St. Martha’s Regional Hospital in Antigonish. For the full Coast report on a pretty shitty day overall, click here.
One small upside in the day is that the province is promising to open third-dose vaccinations to people as young as 50 tomorrow. Make your booking here.
The province’s COVID report says most of the 522 cases are in the Central health authority zone, which has 382 of them. The rest are spread across Eastern zone (59 cases), Western (43) and Northern (38). The province has been so overwhelmed by new cases that it can’t update its data dashboard or provide information about the number of recoveries or active cases.
“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,” the report states. “This continues to better reflect the situation on the ground.”
During this time of no information from the province, The Coast is providing an approximation of the active caseload by adding each day’s new cases to the last reported active caseload (119 active cases on Thursday, Dec 9). That method puts us at 3,550* active cases today, the asterisk suggesting that something is up with this number. And what’s up is that this is the maximum possible caseload, if there were no recoveries. But there have likely been hundreds of recoveries. So 3,550* maximum active cases is all we can say with certainty.
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. Note: From Friday, Dec 10 through today, Nova Scotia has been too overwhelmed by new COVID cases to report recoveries or an official active case count; the active case numbers on this graph for those dates have been calculated by adding each day’s new cases to the last official active count, and are therefore a maximum active caseload.
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. Also, from Friday, Dec 10 through today, Nova Scotia has been too overwhelmed by new COVID cases to report recoveries or an official active case count; the active case numbers on this graph for those dates have been calculated by adding each day’s reported new cases to the last official active count, and are therefore a maximum active caseload.
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. Also, since the start of third doses, provincial vax reports have produced strange results—including some negative numbers—when graphed; The Coast is working to sort this out and we ask for your patience while we do.
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 20, 2021.
Related Stories
COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Monday, Dec 20
COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Sunday, Dec 19
COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Saturday, Dec 18
COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Wednesday, Dec 22
COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Thursday, Dec 23
This article appears in Dec 9-29, 2021.