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
More restrictions!
After announcing a bunch of restrictions on Monday that are intended to slow Nova Scotia’s ongoing disease surge, today the province added some more. Here they are, copied straight from the official announcement:
- masks are required indoors at public schools where physical distancing cannot be maintained; masks are not required outdoors
- spectators at sports games or arts and culture performances cannot eat or drink in the main seating area of the recreation facility or event venue; people must go to a designated area for eating and drinking
- except for medical appointments, residents in long-term care can only leave the facility if they are fully vaccinated, and it is strongly recommended that they have their booster dose as well
- residents in Disability Support Program homes licensed under the Homes for Special Care Act have the same restrictions as residents in long-term care.
The thing about masks at public schools is effective immediately. The other three start this Friday at 9am, along with the rest of Monday’s non-school-related restrictions. Check all the new restrictions here.
Schools get early holiday break
The province announced today that students at schools across Nova Scotia can start their end-of-year vacation few days early. The last day of classes before the holiday break is this Friday, Dec 17, rather than Tuesday, Dec 22 as originally scheduled.
Teachers “will report to work as usual next week” says the province. Teachers, is this a sick burn or a welcome chance to catch up? Answers welcome in the comments.
Education minister Becky Druhan blames COVID for the early closure, saying in the announcement “the recent outbreak in our province has put pressure on our schools, the people who work there and the students and families who are connected to our classrooms.” However, the province takes pains to make clear it’s not worried about the disease spreading in schools; the early holiday is “an operational decision based on staffing pressures and not a public health decision.”
We think that means a lot of teachers and other staff are not in their schools right now. Maybe they tested positive for COVID, are isolating for 72 hours after a close contact with a COVID patient or were suspended from their jobs for refusing to get an anti-COVID vaccine.
178 new cases, unknown recoveries
Nova Scotia is grappling with a raging fire of COVID, a blaze that was sparked at St. Francis Xavier University’s X-Ring celebrations the first weekend of December, and fuelled by the fast-spreading omicron virus variant.
New infections are piling up so quickly that the province can barely keep track of them. “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,” says today’s provincial pandemic report, as did yesterday’s and, with slightly different words, several days before. “This continues to better reflect the situation on the ground.”
Without information from Panorama, we don’t know how many people have recovered from their infections—a number that’s doubtless in the hundreds by now, after several days without being updated. That means we also don’t know how many cases are officially active.
To get an approximate caseload, The Coast took the 178 new cases announced today from the lab, and added it to the active caseload from yesterday (itself an approximation derived the same way from Monday’s data), to arrive at 960* active cases. The asterisk hints that this is the only number that could be calculated from the available information, but the information is lacking the steady stream of recoveries that must be happening even as the infection fire rages.
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 14, 2021.
Related Stories
COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Tuesday, Dec 14
COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Monday, Dec 13
COVID cases and news for Nova Scotia on Sunday, Dec 12
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 Saturday, Dec 18
This article appears in Dec 9-29, 2021.