Scientists claim a zombie takeover would take 100 days

Walkers. 603. The Walking Dead. AMC.
Walkers. 603. The Walking Dead. AMC. /
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Scientists have discovered how long humans would last during an actual zombie apocalypse, and there is actually a silver lining behind all of the bad news.

If you’ve ever wondered how long humans would last during an actual zombie apocalypse, the wait is over. Students at the University of Leicester recently published an article in the school’s Journal of Physics Special Topics that used a modeling program used to predict behaviors in diseases to understand what would happen in the event of a zombie apocalypse and the results were rather astonishing.

According to the model, if you start with 7.5 billion people on the planet, a zombie outbreak would take the world’s population to a mere 273 survivors in 100 days. Yes, that’s right: 273 survivors in 100 days. The virus would be twice as deadly as the Black Plague that struck Europe in the 1300s. A single zombie would wreak havoc on the population in just 20 days.

However, the students took a variety of factors into consideration when it comes to how humans would battle back. They looked at humans fighting zombies, zombies starving to death (assuming that they need brains to survive), and new births, and from all of this they speculated that the zombies would start dying off after 1000 days. Humans would start to see a resurgence after 10,000 days.

There would be some fluctuation in the two populations, of course, as zombie flare ups persist and humans find ways to battle back.

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This isn’t the first time that scientists have speculated about zombie outbreaks. A British medical journal once published a paper about the treatment of zombie infections while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used zombie outbreaks as a metaphor for emergency preparedness.