Re: I'm suggesting it.
"Even if you are pessimistic about long term effects, you cannot round up any realistic guess at the nuclear impact to a level where it even counts as a significant part of the tragedy." -- me
"That's a very simplistic viewpoint, basically that tragedy equals death and nothing else." -- 1980s_coder
I disagree. What it actually says is that NX << MY where
N is the number of people living in (unnecessary) fear, and I accept your point that it may be large
X is the tragedy of a person living in fear in some arbitrary unit
(What is the El Reg unit of tragedy? Perhaps a 'Verdi')
M is the number of people who actually died (~15,000 < M < ~20,000)
Y is the tragedy of a person dying
I'm not discounting the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of people living in fear, sucks for them, even if they are worried about basically nothing. But I am still saying it's insignificant compared to the tragedy of thousands of people dying.