Here is why ‘the hospitals inflating the numbers’ doesn’t change much.
1. There is no fabricated patients. All the covid deaths or cases in the hospital, refer to actual patients. The question is what was their medical condition. Nobody is questioning their existence.
That already concedes that hospitals that reported large amounts of cases were overwhelmed, or close to that. It does not matter if they were there for infection, anxiety, or mischief. Either way, the hospital would have to deal with it.
2. Hospitals receive the extra funding whenever a coronavirus case is closed. Which would include the patient dying. Or leaving the hospital. It makes no difference how the patient leaves the hospital. Even if a patient fully recovers and leaves on his own feet, the hospital is eligible for the extra 20% reimbursement. [I assume this would be the same for patients that are transferred to a different hospital. It is also a closed case for the first hospital.]
There only seems to be an incentive to inflate total cases, not deaths. But they go together. (If someone had TDS and they listed him as coronavirus, if TDS would turn fatal then that would be a mislabeled coronavirus fatality.)
3. Hospitals only receive money for what they provide. (I do not know if this is only treatment, or is the bedding and so on included.) If the patient is deemed covid positive, they get the same money even for non covid related treatments. (Such as a broken foot.)
Either way, hospitals are dealing with an extraordinary amount of serious respiratory infections. Whether they are 95% or 70& percent coronavirus related, it is the same crisis.
4. The real data problem, is that there is no central way to manage the data. If someone tests positive twenty five times over three months before they finally test negative, how many cases is that counted as? There seems to be very little personal information taken at the time of the test.
While this leads to inflated numbers at the point of data collection, it points to a significant rate of infection. In other countries, they know almost everything about every individual case. Because they have tens of cases, not hundreds or thousands. The U. S. only has such confusion, because of it’s high caseload. Dropping a few thousand cases, does not change anything. We are nowhere near effective containment.
Ultimately, the impact of the pandemic could end up being measured as excess deaths in a two, five, and ten year span.