Well, even if there are a bunch of Leonid sand grains in space, space is still mostly empty. But the Leonids we saw in the last couple of years were not the maximum that the Leonids are capable of. If we had run into the mainstream, satellites would have been in jeopardy. Particularly big ones like the Hubble Space Telescope.
Ah, but they were claiming we were running into the mainstream, and all of those satellite were in Great Jeopardy!!!!!
As it turned out, nothing really happened except that these so-called experts got to run off with full boodle-bags.
While there is a nugget of truth at the center of the asteroid scare, I'm an admitted cynic on things like this. Too many managers are susceptible to the wiles of gurus, and they'll chase them to this or that trend until it becomes obvious that another trend is more demanding of their attention.
And the "experts" seem to be comprised of smart guys who know both math and marketing.