Science & Technology

How long would it take for a zombie plague to spread across a city ?

By T.K. Randall
October 29, 2023

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) Zombies have become such a staple of horror movies, games and TV shows over the last two decades or so that, at one point, you couldn't move for them - whether it was The Walking Dead, Shaun of the Dead or Dawn of the Dead, zombies were just about everywhere.

But what if a zombie virus outbreak was to actually happen in real life ?

In a new study, researchers at Aalto University in Finland set out to determine how long it would take for a zombie virus to spread across the country's capital city Helsinki.

Their simulation differed from previous efforts because it included a simulation of individual people and zombies as they moved around both within the city and outside of it.

The results were terrifying to say the least - even a single outbreak within Helsinki would result in the entire city being overrun by zombies within the space of just 7 hours.Beyond that, it wouldn't take long for them to spread across the rest of the country.

"I shouldn't have found it surprising, but I was surprised at how quickly we have to react to keep our population alive," said study lead author Professor Pauliina Ilmonen.

"It made me think about moral issues like the rights of individuals versus the rights of a population."

While calculating the spread of a zombie outbreak might seem like a superfluous exercise, the simulation also has real-world benefits because it can help determine the spread of real viruses.

"The zombie plague simulation offers a way to explore the effects of different interventions and consider them in the context of diseases with different features, such as how quickly they spread or how severe they are," the researchers wrote.

"Because it simulates individuals' actions, it can also be used to test how disinformation would affect the spread of an epidemic (eg, by having some 'zombie deniers' ignore warnings.)"

Source: Mail Online

Tags: Zombie