As an aside, I will offer this without comment. I was having a conversation with someone who was my counterpart in the state patrol over in Bremerton about our recent power outages . I believe him to be very smart and savey. He told me that three separate unrelated health care professionals now have told him that they were "encouraged" to label patients as covid patients.
And the numbers can be presented in such a way to promote the narrative the person presenting them wants the numbers to say. The local officials in my area touted out in their televised updates for months (I don't listen to the updates anymore because the information was being presented poorly so I don't know if they are still attempting to sell this) about how high and terrible our numbers were but neglected to mention in the televised updates that were being done that they were quoting numbers based off a very large 9 county area, to get that information you had to go on a website and read the fine print at the bottom of the page that was about a fourth of the font size of all the other text on the webpage.