Tracking the daily case counts
TRURO — “What’s the number today? Are they out yet?”
If you ask those questions about daily COVID case counts, you’re not alone. Many Nova Scotians eagerly await those releases, which can appear any time from late morning to late afternoon.
Chief medical officer of health Dr. Robert Strang recently explained that after the epidemiology comes in, levels of approval are needed, including from Premier Iain Rankin and himself, before the information is approved and produced — which is why the numbers are not available at a consistent time each day.
Several times recently, Strang has emphasized the daily numbers are not what matters the most.
“I would encourage people, it’s not so much to focus on any one day, it’s what the trend over time that we’re seeing, that’s the most important thing,” he said. “We’re going to have fluctuations up and down.
“I fully expect we’re going to get cases in the teens, maybe even in the 20s for weeks to come. That doesn’t necessarily mean that things are going backwards … it’s all about the context.
“So, while I get people wanting to know the daily case count, there’s a lot more to it than that and think about how things have gone over a week, for instance, rather than focusing on one single day.”
But people are hungry for the daily cases and citizen data analyst Steven McGrath tries his best to share how they fit in the bigger trends, such as new cases per capita, the resolved cases, hospitalizations and other testing data over time.
“Depending on what trend you’re looking at, some things are best looked at over time, some data wouldn’t look great on a daily (basis),” he said.
In his spare time, he has been collecting numbers in an excel spreadsheet since the first day cases were reported in Nova Scotia. He usually pulls numbers from the website early in the afternoon and posts visuals to the COVID-19: Nova Scotia Daily Trends Facebook group he created at the start of the second wave.
McGrath was worried when he first saw the case counts trending upwards in his home community of Sydney while much of the focus was centralized. At one point, he said the case counts per capita were worse than the case numbers in Halifax.
“I think that’s why people want to see it daily,” he said. “In Sydney or Truro or in the smaller areas, it’s more meaningful when you’re in a smaller area and when you see one case pop up … that one case can quickly balloon into 100 cases.”
Nova Scotia created a COVID dashboard but unlike McGrath’s, it does not offer a breakdown of trending data and percentage for zones. And not all case numbers or adjustments are explained daily.
He often fields questions in the group but does not always have the answers.
“People are hungry for the information, is the biggest way I can put it,” said McGrath. “That’s why I think I got such a big response on the site, is because people were starving for information, and it wasn’t presented well enough to them on the Nova Scotia website.”
His data analysis questions are endless, but McGrath believes the province is doing “fabulous.”
“I think they’re doing a fantastic job,” he said. “It’s a hell of a lot better today than it was a year ago, in the data that they give.”