Call ’em what you will. God knows there are more tags for the undead than the sexually confused (mostly rich, mostly spoiled, and overwhelmingly Left of Stalin white kids) use to describe themselves. That whole LGBTA2SAA?Z, etc, etc.
When it comes to the “undead” of the Walking Dead franchise, they’re know as “walkers,” “biters,” “skin-eaters,” “deadies,” “rotters,” and “dead heads.” Those are just some of the tags that Hollywood has branded those who are VERY slowly dying (but still have quite the penchant for human brains).
In 28 Days Later, the Zombies were perfectly lovely people. Only downside was they were infected with the “Rage Virus,” and they wanted to literally rip the uninfected limb from limb. Gruesome, indeed.
In The Ωmega Man, there was a nuclear war in which most of humanity dies… but a rather large number of survivors ended up becoming plague victims who were turned into nocturnal albino mutants. Of course, there’s at least one normal human left on the planet, albeit one who has a thing for mannequins. I guess survivors can’t be choosers.
Then there’s the qualification of zombification as described by Bob Hope back in the 1940s (see video below). Wow, somethings haven’t changed much.
But with all of that aside, researchers from Finland’s Aalto University have figured out just how long a zombie apocalypse would take if the country’s capital, Helsinki, were to have just one single Patient Zero. I guess that a planeload of 500+ passengers on a 747 that originated in Beijing who happen to be in the initial stages of infection touching-down in Finland is beyond the realm of possibility.
Anyhow, keep in mind that the population of the Greater Helsinki Area is slightly over 1.5 million.
As reported by ScienceAlert.com (emphasis mine);
A team led by mathematician Pauliina Ilmonen of Aalto University has been conducting models of a zombie uprising, altering the parameters to determine how a plague of undead would unfold across Finland. Although the full results are yet to be published, the simulations are already ponying up some insights.
For example, the window of time for containing a zombie outbreak is very narrow; with just a single zombie in Helsinki, we’d need to act within just seven hours by destroying the ‘infected’ agent or quarantining the city. After that, zombies overrunning the entire country is inevitable, the researchers say.
But wait, there’s more.
Prof. Wojciech Tomczyk of Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, titled a research paper, DO NOT LET THE DEAD BITE! DIFFERENT SCENARIOS OF THE ZOMBIE EPIDEMIC REEXAMINED.
Below are just a few of the classifications that Tomczyk uses;
Susceptibles (S ) – human population
Infected (I) – those who carry a “zombie virus”
Zombies (Z) – those who lost an encounter with a zombie or were resurrected
Removed (R) – those who died after an encounter with a zombie or permanently killed zombies (decapitation)
As posted online by the everything research website core.ac.uk, using the SZR (Susceptibles, Zombies, Removed) formula;
The Zombie class overtakes the Removed after three days. The entire human population is eradicated within four days.
But on a happier note, instead using the SIZR (Susceptibles, Infected, Zombies, Removed) formula;
The Zombie apocalypse occurs after ten days. The Infected and Removed class survive up to the fifteenth day. Eventually everyone is zombified.
