> Allow me to twiddle the brim of my shiny aluminum hat here and ask objectively one more nagging question, was there any possible benefit to misreporting this

> Allow me to twiddle the brim of my shiny aluminum hat here and ask objectively one more nagging question, was there any possible benefit to misreporting this data? What resources and opportunities did that afford at the time? Hospitals were/still are getting subsidies for every covid patient treated. There is a financial incentive to inflating the covid numbers. Couple that with COVID resembling the regular old flu in many cases and you get inflated numbers. IMO the idea peddled around last year that the regular flu just took a year off while covid was emerging will go down as one of the more egregious examples of cherry picking data in the covid era.