Yes, that’s a very good point, and a real good example of the differences in more local vs long distance damage.
There is a fault line that runs from Missouri up near Boston.
It rang church bells in Boston and made the Mississippi run backwards temporarily in at least one area, and changed the course of the river.
Sparsely populated regions in 1812 are now more densely populated. That’s the real kicker right there. That coupled with less earthquake required infrastructure could be two very bad omens.
Some earthquake retrofitting isn’t that costly or hard to do. It’s mostly cabling framing so that it is much less likely to collapse, and shoring up masonry, bricks, chimneys, and the like.
There are wrought iron “stars” all over the facades of older brick buildings in the Carolinas, that people assume are purely decorative, and they did design them to be decorative. But, the primary purpose served was to keep the brick walls from collapsing into the streets as they did in 1886 during the Charleston quake.