Zombie outbreak how long

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 s.

Assuming a starting population of 7. At that point, the pandemic would have begun. Assuming no geographic isolation, in fact, the human population would drop to by day of the epidemic, with million zombies roaming around. With some geographical isolation, the situation would be a tiny bit better for humans. Because rabies is passed through bites, making a host more likely to bite makes evolutionary sense. Rabies gets us most of the way there with confusion, aggression, and the desire to bite others, but in order to make it an apocalypse-level threat, it needs to be much more transmissible.

Either it needs a much shorter incubation period, on the order of minutes, or it needs to go airborne. A study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in noted that the most apparent transmission method of pandemic-level pathogens is not blood or body-fluid vectors like Ebola but airborne respiratory droplets.

A conclusion that has been borne out in the years since its publication. As most cases of rabies in humans come from bats, we might imagine a horrifying scenario in which zombie bats take the skies to eliminate humanity once and for all. If a virus with rabies-like symptoms found a way to make itself airborne, we might be in a heap of trouble.

The key difference would be that these zombies would be living people, necessarily. Pathogens, for the most part, like to keep their hosts alive at least long enough to pass themselves along.

Supposing we did find ourselves at the mercy of a pathogen like the one described above the zombies themselves might not be your biggest hurdle. Preventing yourself from becoming ill would be a challenge, as is the case during any pandemic event. Face coverings would be a good idea. But in a more positive follow-up study , students factored in that, over time, humans would get better at killing zombies, and also at avoiding being infected. And they could rapidly start having babies, which makes human survival a lot more feasible.

Under these conditions, the team found that it would take around 1, days, or 2. And then another 25 years on top of that for the human population to start to recover from the attack. Which means there might still be hope for the cast of The Walking Dead, if they stop fighting each other and start killing more zombies instead.

And just in case you do ever find yourself in a real-life zombie apocalypse, don't worry, scientists have also calculated the best place for you to hide out , and it's definitely not a shopping mall. The threat of zombie apocalypse has been calculated by way of a research assignment your university wasn't cool enough to give you. Physics students at the University of Leicester in England published actual studies on how a zombie apocalypse would affect the human population, and how long it would be before everyone reverts from simply running in terror to mumbling, "brains, brains, brains.

Special topics, indeed. As the first of two studies showed, most of us when faced with a viral zombie epidemic would wind up kissing our humanity goodbye, with a scant survivors worldwide compared with millions of zombies after only days.

The students assumed each zombie could find one person per day and had a 90 percent chance of infecting its victim. The students calculated the sobering findings by using an SIR model, an epidemiological model used to describe the spread of disease in a population. SIR is short for susceptible, infected and recovered.

The initial study assumed humans as helpless, but a follow-up gave us some added moxie.