According to the John Hopkins site Kentucky only has 10 cases. I think we're being lied to and the number of cases is orders of magnitude higher than what's being reported.
That's possible, but have you considered the alternative? (Or, something that might be happening in combination with lowballing the numbers?)
Test rationing produces undercounting.
To find
all cases of Wuhan Flu, technically everyone ought to be getting tested the moment they have a sniffle. (Then, getting the results back would take the usual day or two, but shortage of staff, and
that many tests piling up first-come, first-serve would produce a test-processing backlog. It could take four days, or five....)
The reality is that probably only one in a hundred
testable cases actually
get tested, because "the rules" are that you don't get tested unless...
(a.) you show up at the ER;
(b.) your condition seems potentially life-threatening when you show up; and,
(c.) they deem that a positive result is likely enough to warrant testing you,
...because of course they're trying to not overload the test-processing capacity of the system.
So, take my family for example. Since late February we've been fighting or passing around what is either one virus or two. Whatever we've had looks and acts just like COVID-19 (but, also, just like a cold followed by a flu). We've isolated ourselves except for grocery-store runs. Fortunately I can work from home.
Was it a cold? Could be, but we never get fevers with colds, and this cold oddly transitioned to a fever and a cough after it had been going on for two weeks. Was it a cold, followed by a flu, thus producing a combination of symptoms? Could be, but where'd we get the flu part? We were already isolating ourselves from others!
So, was it COVID-19? Could be. But we didn't know anyone who'd been to China or Italy, and this started in
late February. That was days
before the earliest confirmed cases of community transmission in our part of the country.
Did we go get it tested? No, because they'd have turned us away: None of us ever had trouble breathing, and we had no known vector for having gotten it. We each went through the 101-degree-fever-and-a-dry-cough phase in about 3 days; then the fever left but the cough lingered, and now the cough is dwindling to nothing. We're still isolating ourselves so that
just in case the virus was Wuhan Flu, we don't pass it to anyone.
So we played it exactly the way you're supposed to play it, and the result is:
IF it was Wuhan Flu,
THEN there's no way the system could be counting it as such.
Multiply that by 50 states, and I think that even if my family's virus wasn't COVID-19, a lot of the
other untested examples out there
are. They just never turned bad enough to warrant testing.
Consequently, you get an underestimation of spread by a factor of...what? Ten? A hundred? Who knows?
In conclusion, I think that yes, it's possible we're being lied to. (It's even possible that, under the circumstances, that would be the exact correct thing to do; or else, a much more morally-defensible error than under normal circumstances.)
BUT, the old adage is, "When dealing with humans, it's usually an error to attribute to malice and cunning that which can be adequately accounted for by confusion and bumbling."
GIVEN that testing is rationed, even our best health-care administrators are flying blind. And of course they report their "best guesses" up the chain to the CDC and the hospital admins, who report it to the governors and HHS, who report it to the VP and the president.
A communication-chain like that probably takes 2 days to get the latest information. Add a couple of days for test-processing. My guess is that anything you hear on the national news, even if it's perfectly honest, is four days out of date by the time you hear it,
AND is underestimating actual infections by an order-of-magnitude merely because we test such a tiny slice of people who might have it.
And that's assuming no tired epidemiologist makes a math error which goes uncaught. Would you bet that
hasn't happened yet? I wouldn't.
Whatever you hear on the television today is -- again, presuming honesty -- just their best guess of what was happening last week.