A point of contention between the populace and officials around COVID is how things were being categorized in how affected by the virus someone was. For instance, someone dying while having the Coronavirus was often counted as being a virus-caused death whether or not it was a car accident that killed them or not.

In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul admitted that when it came to hospitalization rates, they were playing with numbers in much the same way. As it turns out, hospitalizations due to COVID are being way over-reported, but it serves the alarmist purposes of the New York Democrats.

According to WHEC-TV, Hochul effectively admitted that people who came to the hospital for something and were tested positive for COVID were automatically being counted as a COVID hospitalization:

“Someone is in a car accident they go to the emergency room they test positive for COVID while they’re there, they’re not they’re being treated for COVID… Now someone’s condition can worsen while they’re in the hospital, I’m not saying that won’t happen but I’ve just been doing a random call around to some of the hospital leaders that I touch base with and I’m seeing numbers from 20% to sometimes 50%.  We don’t have clear data right now, that’s anecdotal,” the governor explained.

So, Gov. Hochul wants the hard numbers.

“Beginning tomorrow [Tuesday] we’re going to be asking all hospitals to break out for us, how many people are being hospitalized because of COVID symptoms, how many people happen to test positive just while they’re in there for other treatments,” she said, “I think that’s important, I just want to be honest with New Yorkers about how bad this is. Yes, the number of people infected is high but I want to see whether or not the hospitalizations correlate with that.”

It’s possible that New York no longer needs to inflate numbers for the aforementioned alarmism since Omicron is far more transmissible than previous variants of the virus and the idea is that hospitalizations will rise naturally, but Omicron is far milder than its previous iterations as well and according to previous reports, we can expect hospitalizations to stay relatively low.

(READ: No One Is Scared of Omicron and Even Some Doctors are Shrugging It Off)

But a thing to take away here is that they openly lied about how bad things were in order to push the narratives necessary for compliance, and that should be sounding alarm bells. Yes, we knew they were lying already, but this open admission is proof that they don’t exactly have an issue with it, and if they don’t have an issue lying to you about this, what else don’t they have an issue lying about?

I’d say the lesson here is “don’t trust the bureaucrats” but that lesson has been pretty well taught at this point. I think the better lesson here is “stop panicking.”