The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: The Survivable City Myth
By Liam O'Leary
Surviving a zombie apocalypse
2) Lots of people = Lots of zombies
Part of what got me about the studies saying X city or Y city would survive the outbreak was that it didn’t seem like they were considering the massive populations of the cities (And the massive populations of zombies they would turn into).
If you have a city with a population of 100,000 or more, and we start seeing zombies in the numbers we see in The Walking Dead universe, you can probably bet that the overwhelming majority of that population is going to wind up dead, in one form or the other.
Let’s do a little math here: Imagine you have one zombie. Now, imagine that, from bite to zombification, it takes one hour. If that first zombie bites ten people within that first hour, you’ll have eleven zombies by the end of the second hour. Now imagine that each of the new zombies bites ten people; by the end of the third hour, you’ll have somewhere around one hundred twenty-one zombies. If this keeps up like this, by the end of the fourth hour, you’ll have over a thousand zombies. By the end of the fifth hour, you’d wind up with more than ten thousand zombies. If this started at eight at night, you’d have over one hundred thousand zombies by two in the morning!
Now, granted, people might start to notice before that, but when? When it was at a hundred? A thousand? If authorities only truly notice things when the zombies’ population starts getting into the thousands, it might already be too late to stop them. Remember: Assuming that it takes an hour for someone to turn from a bite, of that a zombie will only bite ten people per hour is very generous — It could just as easily be thirty minutes to turn, and they could wind up biting an additional five people in the remaining half-hour, meaning our original ten bite victims could bite fifty people before that second hour is even over!
When you’ve got cities with populations that big, you have to realize you could very easily wind up with zombie populations that big, too.