This link may describe it better:
https://www.wlrn.org/post/floridas-...hange-counting-covid-19-patients-icu#stream/0
I assure you what is described here is absolutely happening in some areas. My wife is affiliated with a hospital which used their ICU as a Covid unit. At one point during the April spike, she was told that they had "10 patients in ICU but only 5 really needed to be there." It was more convenient for the hospital to keep all of the Covid patients isolated. However, if those 5 ICU beds were needed for critical care patients, they had the capacity to relocate the 5 non-critical admissions.
If hospitals are simply counting bodies in beds, all 10 would have been counted as being in the ICU. But only half were receiving ICU-level care. It's not data manipulation to make sure that the counts accurately reflect the care that's being provided.
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In my institution we had designated covid non ICU units set up in the hospital otherwise putting non ICU patients into an ICU and charging for that level of care is insurance fraud.