Count of the number of nodes tagged with a particular status
To do this without code, I think you'd need a view for each category and then in the footer or header, choose "Global: Results summary" and build your message there using the tokens. I saw you post about colours elsewhere so if you have a separate block for each, you can then theme each one as you wish.

If you set the view to "Display All Items" and then add css .viewname .view-content {display:none;} or a custom module to hide the results, it should work nicely.

You could then use some caching to minimize the performance hit.