Your example is not true and u know it. They are testing more and more every year. The more positives they can find the more money they get. Prove me wrong please. I will concede that cwd is real but don't spend research money to put up billboards to get your deer tested. Use it to find a cure. We all know if there is a cure the money is gone and a lot of college educated people won't have a job.
TX has had the same quota for samples for a few years now and they turn up more positives each year than the year before. Starting last year they began having substantial difficulty reaching the quota(and may not have) because new antler restrictions on mule deer dropped harvest substantially and they get most of their tests by hanging out in processor parking lots. Even so, they got more positives than the year before. All that said, TX has relatively few CWD cases. Their first documented case was in 2012, not 1967. They also have far fewer mule deer spread over far more acres. The majority of TX positives are in, or near high fence game operations.
CO tracks percent of positives for each unit, and those numbers have consistently increased since they started doing it. It doesn't matter if they test 1000, or 100,000, if the percent increases from 5%, to 20% the increase in percentage isn't due to increased testing. You can get an increase in total number of positives by increasing testing. Test 1000 deer in an area with 1% prevalence, and you'll get close to 10 positives. Test 10,000 and you'll get close to 100 positives. On the other hand, if you get 1% in year one, 3% in year ten, 9% in year twenty and 27% in year thirty, it has nothing to do with how much you're testing and everything to do with increased prevalence. CO has had nothing but increasing PERCENT positive from the beginning. Utah has an area that is starting to get pretty bad along the CO border.
I'm going to sleep and will be driving most of tomorrow, so I'm not going to look it up for you, but percentages are increasing, not just total numbers. Look for CPW's historical percentages. I'm not sure off the top of my head where they post those, but CPW has documented it fairly well, and it can be found. WY and WI have some areas that have gotten well into double digit prevalence that were nothing like that 20 years ago. I don't know if they've publicly documented it as well as CPW has, but you should be able to find info there too.
Il not denying that testing over all has likely gone up, or that increasing the number of test won't increase the absolute number of positives, but if you don't believe that the actual percentage of infected deer has consistently increased slowly over time, just about everywhere that it's been found, then you're just wrong. NY in the only state that has had a positive, taken action, and continued testing without turning up any new positives.