There's an excellent book called The Great Influenza that gets referenced a lot- it's a chronicle of the 1918 flu that killed millions of people. The primary reason that this happened was a lack of preparedness, and an attempt at covering up the outbreak in order to maintain "public calm." This worried the public more than simply admitting the problem would have. So there's a problem with not just uncertainty of disaster occurrence, but a metaproblem of how to respond to uncertainty about whether a disaster is occurring. Basically, the trend in modern societies is "richer, safer, more afraid" which indicates there is a problem with fear being a part of our culture. By opening up resources for public knowledge, we might initially make a populace afraid and panic-y for an event, but integrating this fear with our lives may eventually make it an acceptable part of living here, and a thing that can be dealt with proactively rather than retrospectively apologized for.
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