Another reason would be that on a day-to-day basis it's easier to say "yeah we had 100 deaths yesterday" than it is to say "we've been lying, there were 1,000 d

Another reason would be that on a day-to-day basis it's easier to say "yeah we had 100 deaths yesterday" than it is to say "we've been lying, there were 1,000 deaths yesterday and 10,000 so far with 500,000 infected in Wuhan by our estimates". Which would probably also cause a wee bit of panic, too. If that's actually the case, of course.