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Dealing with a Zombie Apocalypse


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Researchers at Cornell University have mapped out the safest and worst areas to be during a zombie apocalypse in the US. For those who want to plan ahead.

 

Another safety warning provided by The Wall Street Journal, because when you're rich, you want to live to spend it. :)

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Why stay in the US? Just get over that Atlantic ocean to Europe and you are safe. :D

A zombie epidemic in Avernum.. Now that would be interesting.

I mean, a big one. There's always a few here and there but a practical outbreak of zombies and undead!

With all the regular international travel we have these days, I doubt a zombie outbreak would be contained to the U.S.
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Australia has a better chance of successfully quarantining itself than Europe/Asia/Africa or North/South America do. The WSJ article of course just focuses on the US. Any outbreak of zombies in the US would quickly spread to Canada and Mexico via land transport and almost as quickly spread to the rest of the world via air transport. Australia would have to cut off all air transport very quickly, something that is very hard with a disease type outbreak, but then could rely on the fact that it is an island.

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Zombie scenarios all seem to posit a nearly symptom-free incubation period that is long enough for travel but that then turns into sudden, unexpected face-gnawing. And somehow the hordes happen even though zombies want to eat the brains, which are also a zombie's only weak point, meaning their victims probably wouldn't rise as more shambling undead. Everyone conceals their injuries, and their friends' and relatives', despite the inevitable horrible fate that in turn puts friends and relatives at risk. No one forms mobs to throughly dismember the potentially infected in crazed mobs.

 

Look, this isn't a highly transmissible illness. No one is going around in a contagious but non-obvious state. Sure, once most humans are dead it's really hard to fix things, but what's the likelihood of an uncontained outbreak, really?

 

—Alorael, who finds zombie fiction very poorly thought-out. He is not convinced by the scare-mongering. But get your flu shot.

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Zombie scenarios all seem to posit a nearly symptom-free incubation period that is long enough for travel but that then turns into sudden, unexpected face-gnawing. And somehow the hordes happen even though zombies want to eat the brains, which are also a zombie's only weak point, meaning their victims probably wouldn't rise as more shambling undead. Everyone conceals their injuries, and their friends' and relatives', despite the inevitable horrible fate that in turn puts friends and relatives at risk. No one forms mobs to throughly dismember the potentially infected in crazed mobs.

 

Look, this isn't a highly transmissible illness. No one is going around in a contagious but non-obvious state. Sure, once most humans are dead it's really hard to fix things, but what's the likelihood of an uncontained outbreak, really?

 

—Alorael, who finds zombie fiction very poorly thought-out. He is not convinced by the scare-mongering. But get your flu shot.

 

Pretty much this.

 

They say this is why most zombie fiction takes place after the fall of civilization, because there's really little hope of getting from "no zombies" to "more zombies than mankind can handle" in most zombie incarnations. Even if you ignore all the drawbacks of being rotting meat, just the mere reproductive mechanism of zombies is pretty much a lost cause. What, to reproduce you have to take on the deadliest apex predator Earth has ever seen? Oh, noes, zombies... yeah humanity's mechanisms of defense are built around thinking, cunning enemies armed with supersonic rapid fire death that can come flying, armored, or both. How's Shambles McCerebrophage gonna stand a chance against that?

 

That's why the zombie scenario is really workable is if it works like cheesing a game of Plague Inc. where everyone gets infected before symptoms show up, and then everything goes to pot. If you end up with a few pockets of infection here and there, it's going to be shut down hard - hell, look at what we did with Ebola, and that was in one of the least developed regions of the world. Really, though, the air born pathogen angle kinda makes the whole zombies thing a meaningless after thought because something like that would be infinitely more dangerous than any actual zombie outbreaks.

 

Symbolism and fiction are fine and good, but deconstructing the zombie phenomena doesn't take a shotgun to pull off.

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The zombie scenarios that make the most sense are the ones where it's some highly contagious, probably airborne plague/curse/whatever that infects almost everyone but that only hits, say, 95% of the population with the remaining 5% resistant. That's an instant apocalypse, but you'd get apocalyptic disaster even if the victims weren't zombies just by that 95% lethality.

 

—Alorael, who can come up with other ways to make more plausible zombies. The problem is that it never keeps all the elements that have somehow become the lowest common zombie denominator. Instant zombification from infection helps somewhat in getting the first horde going, for instance, but you lose the agonizing over infected survivors and the brain-eating.

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there's always the original Romero solution, where everyone who dies of any cause with an intact brain becomes a zombie. that might not be enough to end civilisation worldwide but it would at least kickstart things enough to get some chaos going and probably cause some localised disasters

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Ebola had a lower transmission rate than measles, but a higher fatality rate. So it was easier to isolate suspected cases until it was determined that the infection wasn't spreading. So there were fewer cases reaching the US than the measles outbreak in California's Disneyland.

 

A better comparison to a zombie infestation would be to influenza (flu). It has a higher transmission rate to new victims and depending upon which model you use, it will get new victims before it can be quarantined.

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The zombie scenarios that make the most sense are the ones where it's some highly contagious, probably airborne plague/curse/whatever that infects almost everyone but that only hits, say, 95% of the population with the remaining 5% resistant. That's an instant apocalypse, but you'd get apocalyptic disaster even if the victims weren't zombies just by that 95% lethality.

 

—Alorael, who can come up with other ways to make more plausible zombies. The problem is that it never keeps all the elements that have somehow become the lowest common zombie denominator. Instant zombification from infection helps somewhat in getting the first horde going, for instance, but you lose the agonizing over infected survivors and the brain-eating.

 

See, and the problem here is that the "zombie" part of this apocalypse is pretty much a moot point. All the heavy lifting's already been done via disease/curse/whatever, and at what point does it cease being a zombie apocalypse and just turn into a generic plague apocalypse with added zombie DLC? At 95%, even if the zombies successfully kill everyone who's left, how much credit can they really be given? At this point the zombies are just a symptom of a greater disaster, which just further serves to downplay them.

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A better comparison to a zombie infestation would be to influenza (flu). It has a higher transmission rate to new victims and depending upon which model you use, it will get new victims before it can be quarantined.

Flu is transmitted via aerosol. Aerosolized zombie is unusual.

 

—Alorael, who imagines that flying zombies really would make everything worse. And flying microscopic zombies? You're pretty much doomed.

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Zombies don't seem to serve much of a metaphorical purpose anymore. These days, it's all about how desperate people are bad. You could mostly replace zombies with any natural disaster without it meaning anything different.

*small voice* you ever wonder if the zombie genre making a huge comeback in the US after bush gutted the federal emergency infrastructure and especially after hurricane katrina might mean something

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In zombie outbreaks, the government is typically useless, and people are left to fend for themselves after it collapses. "Government is useless" is a popular idea in some circles. But I'm not convinced that the popularity of the genre has anything to do with events during the Bush administration particularly. Vampires, werewolves, witches, psychics, gods and demons seem to be all the rage these days as well.

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Interestingly enough, Bush didn't gut the Federal emergency infrastructure, and what Katrina showed was how poorly prepared some local and state governments were to handle a natural disaster. The plan for decades under both Democrat and Republican presidents was for the local authorities to exhaust their capabilities, call to the state for help, then the state exhausts their capabilities and calls on the Federal Government to help with various charity groups (Red Cross, Salvation Army, etc) following essentially the same scheme. In New Orleans, the city did not use its resources (remember the lack of evacuation despite all of the busses sitting idle) and then complained that the Federal government had not done many of the tasks that were the City's and States's responsibility. While FEMA certainly did not cover itself with glory, the first and largest failures were with Mayor Nagin, but that is not the story that the media portrayed.

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There were questions after Katrina on why more aid went to states along the Gulf with Republican governors compared to Louisiana's Democrat governor.

 

FEMA did a lousy job with idled relief supplies not getting where it could be used. Then there were safety issues with temporary shelters. When news crews could get through and not government relief crews, you have to wonder about blame.

 

The whole system broke down starting with the area wasn't ready for that disaster level.

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While I don't like Bush, I feel like the Office of the President couldn't have exactly done a lot - it's more fair to blame the "administration" than the man himself, though, when Katrina is the topic, he will never really live down that very ill-advised photo-op. The levees had been mismanaged down there for years. While you don't see it if you're not in Louisiana, you can believe that local government certainly got its share of the blame, which unfortunately in part allowed for the rise of Bobby Jindal.

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