The tornado track was over 200 miles long.
An F5 hit Lubbock in 1970, 26 dead and 1500 injured. At one point the largest tornado was 1.5 miles wide.
Waco, which wouldn’t qualify as a metro area, was hit by an F5 in 1953, 114 dead, taking out a chunk of downtown. Waco never fully recovered from that storm.
For bigger cities, Atlanta has been hit by several smaller tornadoes, and Fort Worth took a direct hit on its downtown area a few years ago. It both cities, damage was costly, but injuries were few.
To predict ‘thousands of deaths’ shows an unfamiliarity with how tornadoes work.
On 27 May 1896, long before tornado warning systems, modern construction, or speedy transport for the masses, an F4 tornado made a direct hit on downtown Saint Louis, Missouri and killed 255 to 400 when people lived in densely packed tenements because they couldn’t afford cars for commuting. Only two tornadoes in American history have exceeded that death toll, and none has equaled the monetary damage ($3 billion) that it wrought. Those two more deadly tornadoes were the 1840 Natchez (317 dead) and the Tri-State Tornado of 1925 (695 dead).
I therefore find the probability of a single tornado killing 2000 or more people in this country exceedingly remote to nonexistent regardless of any circumstances.