This is a murky area, even in western countries. For example: How do you classify, what corona positive person died of? His pre-existing heart condition? His fat liver? His chain smoking? Was it cardiac arrest that killed him, or was it the corona stress that caused the cardiac arrest? Was it really corona that pushed him over the edge? It is a tough call, and these numbers are easy to use for political gaming.

The number for total cases is a meaningless number, unless you also publish the numbers of how many individuals you tested. This way you can at least guess, just how many infected are out there.

Simple reality is, the more people you test, the more "cases" you will find in absolute numbers, while the relative percentage of positive vs. tested individuals cases most probably goes down (if not, only divine intervention can help mankind).

Also the relevance of "how many" is rather limited, because already one super spreader is one too many. In an unrestricted environment, a single super spreader can produce more than 2000 infections within 7-10 days, and that escalates rapidly thereafter.

Our scientists seem to be confident, that the infectious period of a super spreader is 2 weeks, during which he either falls ill or recovers without ever falling seriously ill. Either way he is out of the infection risk. So if you lock down a city and ban person-to-person contacts for at least 4 weeks, you can get a grip on it, probably without ever really knowing, how many infected had actually been out there.