Early March 2020 my wife and I had just gotten back from Florida's Hutchinson Island. The corona virus outbreak was already news but it still seemed far away. There were signs folks there were taking it seriously (no hand sanitizer anywhere) or at least taking notice in some fashion (Corona Beer from Mexico was on sale because of some kind of magical association). So we bought a box of little alcohol wipes which had been overlooked by the hordes and exclusively drank Corona.
When we got home to Nova Scotia there were already rumblings of lockdowns, quarantines and border closures. Two days later everything came grinding to a halt as we tried to globally get a handle on what happened and how we could deal with it.
My way of dealing with things is digging into the data, so over the next few months I located sources and started plotting what was directly meaningful to me. In this case were we safe in Nova Scotia (turns out compared to the rest of the world we were ridiculously safe), how risky might it be to go out for groceries and or visit other places nearby and lately how far along is our local vaccination effort. These dynamic plots were the result. Now that we've hit Omicron and Canada has become mostly vaccinated, the powers-that-be have moved away from daily updates on cases. Understandably hospitilization and death have become much more powerful indicators of the super-infectious yet less-deadly variant. These plots were much more meaningful in the first 2 years and I've kept them as a record.
If you're going to do anything in an other-than-half-assed way, you need to first survey what's out there. The number of digital files available for plotting coronavirus information is expansive, but becomes much smaller as you narrow your focus to individual provinces and their health regions. For months I was travelling to each provinces coronavirus webpage daily to collect data into a spreadsheet. It wasn't until I tracked the source of Health Canada's own dataset that I stumbled on the Canada Open Data Working Group.
Also health region case data pulled from the COVID-19 Canada Open Data Working Group: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ishaberry/Covid19Canada/master/timeseries_hr/cases_timeseries_hr.csv
The datasets are updated each night although sometimes it can be tardy. To allow the most time for updates the server providing the dynamic plots pulls the data down daily around 6AM Atlantic.