Why are branches that are never executed ignored?

I've noticed the [Cobertura Jenkins plugin](https://github.com/cobertura/cobertura) reporting high conditional coverage for a poorly tested project. Further investigation revealed that all untested files reported no (and I don't mean 0%) conditional coverage, so the aggregated result only included already-tested files, which inflated the average.

The reason is that gcovr simply doesn't report these branches:

```
try:
    count = int(fields[3])
    branches.setdefault(lineno, {})[int(fields[1])] = count
except:
    # We ignore branches that were "never executed"
    pass
```

If I replace that with:

````
fields = line.split()
try:
    count = int(fields[3])
except:
    count = 0
branches.setdefault(lineno, {})[int(fields[1])] = count
````

I got the 0% coverage number for these files and the shamefully low aggregated result I was expecting.

Why are never executed branches currently skipped?