Better late than never? Yes, but this is very, very late. And even then, one has to question the timing on this and wonder what the real motive might be for this change:

The Biden administration is working on recalculating the number of Covid-19 hospitalizations in the U.S., according to two senior officials familiar with the matter.

A task force comprised of scientists and data specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working with hospitals nationwide to improve Covid-19 reporting. The group is asking hospitals to report numbers of patients who go to the facility because they have Covid-19 and separate those from individuals who go in for other reasons and test positive after being admitted, the two officials said.

The administration’s goal is to get a more accurate sense of Covid-19’s impact across the country and whether the virus is causing severe disease. Senior Biden health officials have increasingly relied on hospitalization numbers, rather than case counts, to determine how to respond to the virus as well as the efficacy of the vaccines.

All of this has been true for a long while now, even during the Alpha and Delta waves. We’ve been talking about the difference between correlative and causative COVID hospitalizations since May 2021, when New York Magazine blew the whistle on the lack of distinction in the data regarding pediatric hospitalizations. Seven months later, the same problem presented itself in the Omicron wave.

And yet, nothing changed at the CDC until yesterday, apparently. Rochelle Walensky admitted two weeks after Anthony Fauci’s grudging admission on hospitalization data that they still weren’t requiring hospitals to report whether positive COVID tests were the cause of hospitalizations rather than just correlated to admissions for other reasons. So why change now, when the Omicron wave has crested and is now receding? Three guesses:

Lower hospitalization rates could inform the administration’s thinking on public health measures such as masking. More accurate Covid-19 numbers also could provide a better picture of the strain on hospitals and which resources they might need during surges.

In other words, the White House wants an off-ramp from its mask-mandate expressway to midterm disaster. The easiest way to get that off-ramp built is to get numbers that allow for a narrative change. “Look how far hospitalizations have dropped!” they can say. “Now we can change our policies to avoid all of the voter anger that these futile gestures have created for us!”

Don’t get me wrong; this is a necessary change, but it’s loooong overdue. It should have changed nine months ago, when it became clear that the CDC’s pediatric hospitalization data painted a distorted and inaccurate picture of the actual threat to public health and health-care systems by including correlated admissions rather than only those caused by acute and serious COVID infections. Rather than take that opportunity to revamp reporting at that time, the Biden administration kept the policies in place. They also kept it in place all through three months of the Omicron wave, when correlation-only admissions were clearly a much bigger issue than ever with hospitalization data. Why? It could have just been bureaucratic inertia, but let’s just note that Biden’s inclination toward hysteria and autocratic interventions would have been tougher to support with lower hospitalization numbers.

Now Biden and Democratic governors and mayors face widespread anger over that official hysteria and autocratic interventions. Suddenly, they want more narrowly focused numbers not only to justify retreat from those mandates, but also to avoid the perception that they’re surrendering to reality about the nature of endemic COVID. It’s all rather transparently political, which is yet another example of why public-health officials have lost the trust of voters and why the next set of mandates are doomed to failure.