https://github.com/aldeed/meteor-tabular handles this with custom subscriptions, and it stays up to date by continuously polling the collection without a limit. If you want to get more real-time or more scalable, the problem is that if the total-count subscriptions can't fit in Meteor's memory, every subscription would need to re-request its count from Mongo on every incoming oplog entry, no matter whether it ends up mattering.
Sadly, Horizon doesn't seem to support aggregate queries yet, reactive or not, without loading the records with findAll. Theoretically, Rethink could be even more scalable at this than Mongo, since it could use its index to only "wake up" relevant count subscribers. But this is still on the roadmap:
https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/3735
https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/1118
Generally, it seems Horizon is very limited compared to Meteor, but it's a great fresh start, with a much more well-thought-out and scalable architecture, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.