True! But, this count matches the rows returned in results arrays, whether as the result of an EXECUTE or other method.

The documentation cautions that getting a count of rows might not work for certain drivers but doesn't explicitly say that for MySQL the results are not guaranteed. I had this code after the loop where I processed the results and the row count matches the number of rows returned in arrays (and for other search words, I do get more than 1 row but always less than shown in pure SQL via PHPAdmin and other query processes.)