Timing is everything and there are no coincidences in politics. Until Donald Trump vacated the White House, since April of last year, legacy media outlets relentlessly reported COVID-19 cases and deaths. Now the Associated Press has announced they will change the way coronavirus cases are reported since the Omicron variant poses little threat to people it infects and they’ve even told their staff to avoid stressing the number of cases in news stories about the contagion.

Essentially, the AP is going to downplay coronavirus case counts and it just so happens this is just in time for the upcoming midterm elections when Democrats are expected to lose badly. But it isn’t just the AP making changes, other media outlets will follow because the Omicron variant is, according to the AP, making a mess of the usual statistics, forcing news organizations to rethink the way they report such figures.

As a result of the subtleties of how COVID tests are being carried out, the AP hints that the number of cases can’t be added together with the actual number of them. To do so, they said, would result in the probability of their being substantially higher than what’s being reported on the state and federal level.

With this report, AP is also admitting there is a difference between being hospitalized because of COVID and being hospitalized with coronavirus. This as opposed to before that any suggestion of a difference between the two categories, like Donald Trump did, but was decried as a conspiracy theory.