Someone check my math and accuracy of these numbers. But a quick Google search tells me that NC has 176 hospitals. If 78% were reporting that means 137 of them reported. That means 39 of them did not report.

This is certainly non-scientific, but in the article, it states that when 25 hospitals were added the number jumped by over 100. So, using that as our only predictor, it's possible that the number you saw about a week ago was low by over 100 at least (likely more if the initial indicator is anywhere near reliant). During that time we were seeing hospitalizations numbers around 560-570s. So IF you added 100 to that you'd be in the 660s to 670s...and a week later the 702 number (with 94% reporting) is certainly an increase, but nowhere near as large an increase as we are seeing on the DHHS dashboard.

Again, maybe those 39 unreported hospitals didn't have any COVID patients. Maybe they had less than 100 or maybe they had more. We won't know, but the point of doing that math was to show how different the picture looks when you take the "% reporting" into consideration when looking at hospitalizations.