Evolving Corruption

Deputy Marshal Samuel Gerard: Cosmo, this guy's dirty.
Marshal Cosmo Renfro: Yeah, he is Sam.
--The Fugitive

Public health officials are changing reporting standards for CV19 hospitalizations. Rather than including all with a positive CV19 tests, reports now count only patients who are being actively treated for CV19 in the hospital.

The rationale being offered is along the lines of 'we're merely evolving with the virus."

Several questions seem to have escaped those reporting this story for Associated Press, including:

Why does a change in the virus justify a change in reporting standards? Isn't a valid standard robust to various situations? 

Doesn't this amount to a change in reporting hospitalizations 'from' rather than 'with' CV19--something many 'skeptics' argued in favor of early in the pandemic?

Will you be going back and adjusting historical data to reflect the new standard? If not, then when we review the series longitudinally, we're not comparing apples to apples, are we? Why isn't this another case of manipulating (or corrupting) CV19 data?

Isn't the new standard more in line with what historically counted as a 'case' in viral accounting? Stated differently, why wasn't the 'new' standard the previous standard as well?

What is really evolving here is the degree of corruption with the reporting system.