Zombies Would Wipe Out Humans in Less than 100 Days

The zombie apocalypse will not take long.

A new article inside a peer-reviewed student journal finds that the zombie hordes would take Earth’s population down to a mere 273 survivors in one hundred days.

The paper, published in the University of Leicester’s Journal of Physics Unique Topics, was a fanciful use of the so-called SIR model, that is used in epidemiology to simulate how illnesses spread over time. It is not the very first-time zombies have been utilized as a public well-being metaphor. In December 2015, for example, the British healthcare journal The Lancet published a tongue-in-cheek paper titled “Zombie infections: epidemiology, treatment, and prevention.” Along with a viral blog post in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged zombie apocalypse preparations as a metaphor for real-life disaster preparedness.

Within the new analysis, the University of Leicester undergraduates assumed that every zombie would have 90 {439c7578e082a8602993674605f70ddf4006dba2ba8c13badb0ffa431ba627cf} success at finding and infecting 1 human per day – a price that would make the zombie virus twice as contagious as the Black Death, the plague that devastated Europe in the 1300s. [Zombie Animals: five Genuine Instances of Body-Snatching]

The researchers further estimated that every zombie could reside 20 days without braaaaaains.

Assuming a beginning population of 7.five billion people, roughly the world’s population today, the students calculated that it would take 20 days to get a single zombie to start an epidemic of noticeable proportions. At that point, the pandemic would have begun. Assuming no geographic isolation, actually, the human population would drop to 181 by day 100 from the epidemic, with 190 million zombies roaming around.

With some geographical isolation, the situation could be a tiny bit much better for humans. Assuming the zombie virus had to spread through contiguous regions and that zombies had been somewhat limited in their ability to travel (not leaving their current area till there were one hundred,000 zombies roaming there), human survivors would number 273 by day one hundred, the study discovered.

A much more realistic model might assume that every zombie could discover fewer human victims more than time, the students wrote because there would simply be fewer humans to find.

“We have also not integrated the possibility for the humans to kill the zombies,” they wrote.

But by no means fear: In a follow-up paper, the students did just that. They extended the zombie life span to 1 year in order to up the challenge a bit, but additionally gave every human a ten {439c7578e082a8602993674605f70ddf4006dba2ba8c13badb0ffa431ba627cf} chance of killing a zombie each day. Additionally, they accounted for human reproduction, assuming reproductive-age women would be able to possess a baby once every 3 years.

These assumptions supplied some hope for humanity. Under this model, the human population quickly dropped off to a couple of hundred once more. However, the zombies died off following 1,000 days, below this model; 10,000 days following the beginning of the epidemic, the human population would begin to recover once more, the students discovered.

Original article on Live Science.