Zombies are the eternal favorites of the public. Why else would science fiction writers and Hollywood screenwriters come back to them over and over again? And now scientists are also interested in the revived dead …
MODELS OF VIRAL APOCALYPSE
What happens if the causative agent of some dangerous disease breaks free? How long will humanity have to be saved? And is salvation possible? These questions were posed by a group of scientists led by Russian biologists and virologists. And in order to answer them more fully and brighter, scientists have taken the "ordinary zombie" as the causative agent, keeping in mind its exceptional infectious ability. The zombie invasion is very similar to the spread of real diseases, and this made them a convenient object for research by epidemiologists.
By the way, the results obtained have already been useful to virologists and physicians who are forced to withstand real epidemics: Ebola and bird flu.
Further - more: the model of Russian virologists formed the basis of the work of Canadian researchers from the University of Ottawa. They mathematically modeled the spread of diseases such as HIV, malaria, the West Nile virus, and at the same time gave out their version of the capture of humanity by the living dead. The results of their work were presented in the scientific work "Mathematical Modeling of Zombies".
CRITICAL DEMOGRAPHY
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Usually, in horror and disaster films, a person very quickly turns into a zombie after being bitten. So, in "War of the Worlds Z" the count goes literally by seconds. But the symptoms of real diseases, such as HIV, may appear not even after a month, but many years after infection. In addition, during the invasion of zombies, according to horror films, people attack the living dead. This fundamentally contradicts the course of a normal pandemic, because people are not trying to destroy carriers of the infection. However, the Canadian zombie model takes into account all these nuances. The researchers applied the results obtained in the model of the spread of the human papillomavirus and even achieved some success.
In the course of the research, the Canadians also confirmed the main forecast of the Russians, according to which on a certain day after the beginning of the zombie apocalypse and the rapid spread of undead across the Earth, the number of people will decrease to a critical demographic point. After that, the re-population of the planet by humanity will become very problematic.
POINT OF NO RETURN: CALCULATIONS
But how many days will be given to humanity? Several mathematicians and physicists from the British University of Leicester, having familiarized themselves with the works of Russian and Canadian scientists, decided to calculate the value of the critical point of the human population, followed by the death of our civilization. They compared their findings with the consequences of outbreaks of incurable and deadly diseases such as Ebola.
British scientists called their computer project “The Perfect Zombie Pandemic”. According to their scenario, the speed of development of the zombie apocalypse is determined by two main parameters: the speed of the process of "zombification" of a living person and the duration of the existence of the walking dead.
The writers and screenwriters describing this process paint completely different pictures. If you believe one, then the infection is almost instantaneous and guaranteed, but the zombies themselves live no more than a month. Others only spend several hours on the infection process, and the further life of zombies is measured for decades - and at the same time without any food.
Considering the consequences of such "outbreaks of zombie pandemics", British experts decided to create their own scenario of catastrophic events. To do this, they turned to historical data on the most terrible epidemic in the history of mankind - the outbreak of plague in the XIV century. This terrible pandemic, called the Black Death, devastated medieval Europe and so weakened its southeastern region that a Turkish invasion was possible.
In a modern zombie scenario, infection with a "bloody contact" with a virus carrier occurs with a 90 percent probability, and the walking dead themselves lead an active way of existence for no more than three weeks and "crumble into dust" after all internal resources have been used up.
A HUNDRED DAYS OF EARTH
For their calculations, scientists took the total population of the Earth from real demographic indicators - about 7.5 billion people. In addition, the British model for the spread of zombies took into account the existence of borders between countries and the extremely uneven population density. For example, zombies received the right to cross the border of the country where they became infected, only having reached the number of at least 10 thousand individuals. If the zombies could not reach such a population, they simply died out, as happens in local epidemics.
As these calculations showed, in a densely populated area, one infected person is enough for a large-scale epidemic to break out. This will happen on the 20th day after the first infection. And in 100 days only 181 people and about 190 million zombies will live on Earth.
Even if people flee the areas affected by the zombie pandemic, the infection will still prevail. The most optimistic scenario leaves only 273 people and approximately a million undead alive on the 100th day.
In either case, the number of survivors will be much lower than the level that is necessary to repeat the history of mankind and the new colonization of the planet.
An epidemic in New York was modeled as an example. The central areas there fell in one day, but the suburbs had at least a month to prepare for the invasion of the dead. In any case, if the ideal zombie pandemic lasts more than 100 days, humanity will be doomed to extinction …
For the same reason, the safest place when zombies attack will be mountains and hilly areas, where the population density is minimal. Therefore, the optimal tactic for survivors is as follows: to go to the mountains at the first reports of the appearance of the living dead.