Are Zombies Real? New Study Gives Humanity Grim Hopes of Survival

Students at Leicester University have developed a mathematical model that has predicted that a zombie outbreak would spread through the human population at a rate faster than the Black Death and could potentially wipe out humanity in 100 days.

The mathematical model developed by the students, which presupposes that a Zombie can infect one person each day with a 90 percent success rate, predicts that only 273 survivors would remain after 100 days of the Zombie outbreak and with such overwhelming odds (outnumber by a million to one) humanity could be pushed to the edge of extinction in less than six months, according to their study.

However, the students also cautioned against some margin of error in their statistical predictions. For instance, the students did not account for humans killing zombies or the fact that their 90 percent rate of spread of infection would remain a constant.

“As the zombie to human ratio increases, this becomes less realistic...We have also not included the possibility for the humans to kill the zombies. Including this may give the humans a better chance at survival,” the students wrote in a paper titled “A Zombie Epidemic,” which was published in the journal Physics Special Topics.

Other assumptions used to develop the mathematical model called “SIR” to investigate the spread of disease included: accounting for different speed in spread of infection in less or more densely populated areas; presuming a life span of 20 days for zombies before they die of starvation and presuming that zombies can cross the geographical barriers.

Considering for a moment that the dystopic conclusions of the research may be correct, another related study authored by researchers at Cornell in 2015 that developed an apocalyptic simulator to determine the movement of Zombies in the U.S. may also be a useful read.

According to the key findings of the study, cities would be the first to fall and for the best survival chance, survivors should flock to the less populated areas such as the mountainous western regions.