Comment by el_cujo

I agree that it's probably not a 100% accurate picture, but if you included in the "known cases" every single person who stayed home out of paranoia because they had a stuffy nose, then you'd have the opposite problem of numbers being bloated and overblown. The media is already chomping at the bit to sow fear and paranoia in exchange for views, I'm ok with looking at data with the understanding that it's probably underrepresented versus data that is probably just a complete guess. In an ideal world, yes, every single hospital would have thousands of test kits on hand to test everyone but we aren't there yet.