These 1,600 people died because they escaped.

Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Ronnlund.  Page 115.

So the fear instinct can sure help to remove terrible things from the world. On other occasions, it runs out of control, distorts our risk assessment, and causes terrible harm.

Eight miles underwater, on the seafloor of the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of Japan, a “seismic slip-rupture event” took place on March 11, 2011. It moved the Japanese main island eight feet eastward and generated a tsunami that reached the coast one hour later, killing roughly 18,000 people. The tsunami also was higher than the wall that was built to protect the nuclear power plant in Fukushima. The province was flooded with water and the world’s news was flooded with fear of physical harm and radioactive contamination.

People escaped the province as fast as they could, but 1,600 more people died. It was not the leaking radioactivity that killed them. Not one person has yet been reported as having died from the very thing that people were fleeing from. These 1,600 people died because they escaped. They were mainly old people who died because of the mental and physical stresses of the evacuation itself or of life in evacuation shelters. It wasn’t radioactivity, but the fear of radioactivity, that killed them. (Even after the worst-ever nuclear accident, Chernobyl in 1986, when most people expected a huge increase in the death rate, the WHO investigators could not confirm this, even among those living in the area.)