The Zombie Apocolypse

[KEND]

Zombies Would Wipe Out Humans in Less than 100 Days
LiveScience
Stephanie Pappas
The zombie apocalypse won't take long.
A new article in a peer-reviewed student journal finds that the zombie hordes would take Earth's population down to a mere 273 survivors in 100 days.
The paper, published in the University of Leicester's Journal of Physics Special Topics, was a fanciful use of the so-called SIR model, which is used in epidemiology to simulate how diseases spread over time. It's not the first time zombies have been used as a public health metaphor. In December 2015, for example, the British medical journal The Lancet published a tongue-in-cheek paper titled "Zombie infections: epidemiology, treatment, and prevention." And a viral blog post from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged zombie-apocalypse preparations as a a metaphor for real-life disaster preparedness.
In the new analysis, the University of Leicester undergraduates assumed that each zombie would have 90 percent success at finding and infecting one human per day — a rate that would make the zombie virus twice as contagious as the Black Death, the plague that devastated Europe in the 1300s. [Zombie Animals: 5 Real Cases of Body-Snatching]
The researchers further estimated that each zombie could live 20 days without braaaaaains.
Assuming a starting population of 7.5 billion people, approximately the world's population today, the students calculated that it would take 20 days for a single zombie to start an epidemic of noticeable proportions. At that point, the pandemic would have begun. Assuming no geographic isolation, in fact, the human population would drop to 181 by day 100 of the epidemic, with 190 million zombies roaming around.
With some geographical isolation, the situation would be a tiny bit better for humans. Assuming the zombie virus had to spread through contiguous regions and that zombies were somewhat limited in their ability to travel (not leaving their current region until there were 100,000 zombies roaming there), human survivors would number 273 by day 100, the study found.
A more realistic model might assume that each zombie could find fewer human victims over time, the students wrote, because there would simply be fewer humans to find.
"We have also not included the possibility for the humans to kill the zombies," they wrote.
But never fear: In a follow-up paper, the students did just that. They extended the zombie life span to one year in order to up the challenge a bit, but also gave each human a 10 percent chance of killing a zombie each day. They also accounted for human reproduction, assuming reproductive-age women would be able to have a baby once every three years.
These assumptions provided some hope for humanity. Under this model, the human population rapidly dropped off to a few hundred again. However, the zombies died off after 1,000 days, under this model; 10,000 days after the beginning of the epidemic, the human population would start to recover again, the students found.

[Steve James]

The funny thing is that, in Haiti, no one is afraid of zombies. They're afraid of being turned into zombies because they'd be controllable.

But, looking at zombification as an infectious disease is interesting, based on the assumption that they have the desire to spread the infection. It's somewhat more scientific than proposing zombies search for brains.

Afa the student study, though, variables such as humans killing or controlling zombies (aopt them hunting us), assuming zombie speed, allowing for the percentage of amputees, elderly, very young, etc who would be the first ones infected by hunter zombies, might change the prediction.

But, for me, the one thing that most zombie scenarios lack is a good explanation of the cause. Afa entertainment, it's probably better that no explanation is given (as in The Walking Dead). Though, I think that World War Z handled it best of all. However, that was the opposite of Romero's "living dead" who were just a new type of 60s monster. The zombie produced by failed military experiments or chemical malfunctions are usually more interesting because of what the zombies do.

What I really want to know is what would happen if the zombies won. There have some interesting attempts at showing zombies coexisting with humans. But, imagine if zombies took over? They'd never die; then again, how would they reproduce? Ah, if they were intelligent (maybe the reason they'd seek brains), they would keep humans alive to farm them. All it would take is one smart zombie, maybe like the chimp Caesar in Planet of the Apes.

[Michael]

Are the people in movies who serve as zombie-stupid plot device enablers better or worse than real life enablers of stupid stuff? I think it's a close call, so maybe 101 days.