We all think we’d be able to survive a life-or-death apocalypse, but what if you sprinkled in a zombie outbreak?
I didn’t think so.
Obviously, those who are avid fans of shows like The Walking Dead or The Last Of Us, you might think you’ve got an advantage, but that scenario has been tainted by a real study on what would happen.
Research by a team at Aalto University decided that they would be the ones to find out exactly what would happen in the real world, should some bad mushrooms take over or a strange disease. Warning, it’s not what you want to read.
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They ended up creating simulations which suggest that even if one person turned into a zombie in Helsinki, it would be less than a day between patient zero and having to quarantine the city or kill every zombie.
Seven hours really isn’t a lot of time to prevent a mass extinction.
But if you can’t do that, zombies would 'inevitably overrun the country', according to the team.
To find out what would really happen, the researchers investigated zombie plagues and how it would spread throughout Finland.
Instead of using traditional models, they instead added a simulation of people and zombies moving around in Finland to see what the result would be.
This helped the team to simulate quarantining an infected region, or what the difference would be if a zombie outbreak happened in a city versus if it was in the countryside.
But there were some challenges with this, according to Professor Lauri Viitasaari, the leader of the model.
She asked: “What's the right probability for a human winning an encounter with a zombie?”
“The problem is that we're walking blind here, because real data on such questions is severely limited.”
However, the model showed that if a plague broke out, it would probably spread extremely fast, taking around seven hours to spread throughout an entire city.
“I shouldn't have found it surprising, but I was surprised at how quickly we have to react to keep our population alive,” explained Professor Pauliina Ilmonen, leader of the study.
“It made me think about moral issues like the rights of individuals versus the rights of a population.”
Even though the initial reason for the study was purely out of interest, it might help with disease control and future issues.
The team wrote in a statement: “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.”
“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).”
But this study can be adapted to other areas outside of Finland, according to the researchers.
So, do you still think you’ll survive?
Topics: Science, Health, Technology, News, Weird
Britt Jones