You know, it’s difficult not to laugh at the computer screen when reading something like this in January 2022:

Massachusetts has a new way of how they are reporting COVID-19 hospitalizations to differentiate between what they are calling “primary” and “incidental” cases.

The state is now reporting the difference between patients who were admitted for the virus, or who came in for other illnesses and ended up testing positive. …

As of the first day of differentiating between hospitalizations on Thursday, the state reported 52.2% of patients were there because of the severity of the virus, while 47.8% were there for other illnesses and tested positive.

Naturally, Melanie DaSilva’s WPRI article makes no mention of the fact that skeptics of the government’s response to the pandemic have been insisting on this distinction for years, now.

As a reminder, I went back and found the post I wrote in April 2020 when Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s administration revised its COVID hospitalization numbers according to a new, “streamlined” reporting tool.  The change brought a 25% increase in the count of hospitalizations, and although it took a few days, my original guess proved correct:  the state had started including people admitted to the hospital and testing positive whether COVID was the reason they were there or not.  Conspicuously, as I noted at the time, the change in methodology came with a shift in the mainstream narrative, from insisting that hospitalizations were the key metric to watch to a count of “cases.”  Coincidentally, hospitalizations had started going down before the change.

Ever since, Rhode Islanders have had no way of knowing how much of our pandemic consisted of people with mild or no symptoms who happened to be tested for some reason.  (Not to be conspiratorial or anything, but you might recall that the intervening months brought a couple national elections with objectionable changes to the system, favoring Democrats and pushed through as a response to the contagion.)

We don’t have to go all the way to talk about a “plandemic” to see the importance of remembering the history.  COVID hit, and governments seized enhanced power, escalated on a ratchet, particularly with “two weeks to flatten the curve.”  When hospitalizations began to recede, Rhode Island made its count less accurate, and ever since, we can reasonably conclude, we’ve been overcounting hospitalizations because of COVID-19 by 25–50%.

Now that the politics have changed, the narrative is changing, too, taking up some of the more-reasonable perspectives that many of us have been demanding all along.

Featured image by Amirr Zolfiqari on Unsplash.