So we looked at near-earth asteroids because, well, they are near-earth. Turned out none of them is on a collision course with Earth in the foreseeable future. This is good, of course, but it does not mean that the estimated risk went down -- what happened was that it did not go up and that's a different thing.

I had the impression that the near-earth ones were the ones that, averaged over earth's history, are the bulk of the problem. So if the current crop of near-earth asteroids aren't likely to hit us in the historically-near future, doesn't that mean that our near-future risk of impact is below the long-term average risk?

(I am not an astronomer and do not vouch for "NEAs are the main part of the risk" from personal knowledge.)