This all differs in time, as the governments change everything to push a high or low number of cases, depending on what policies they want to install.

Great point. The actual case numbers are beyond suspicious because of all of the elements you're talking about here. I work with the numbers as given, because they're the only numbers we have, but the effects you are talking about here are profound, meaning that all these datasets are essentially garbage before they are ever published. The effects of the lies about covid absolutely swamp the actual signal of the disease itself. Because of this, in the end, none of us actually knows what we're looking at. This is as true within the medical community as it is outside it.