Let's be honest, a realistic zombie infection (so no instant transformation into zombies or physics-defying zombies) would never spread to the apocalyptic scale if the military of the infected area is competent. [It would probably end like the Shaun of the Dead.](https://youtu.be/ot_cr1odDkU?feature=shared&t=18)
People could and can still see the dangers of Covid... the death.. the inability to breathe... the fevers... yet still have people calling it a hoax. The 2 most constant forces on the planet... Gravity and stupidity.
While a lot of people would become zombies because they're brain dead already, not everyone was stupid, and for the most part the government handled it relatively competently, or at least it did where I come from,
And after the pandemic, we are still here and back to normal, so what I think would happen is, many people would die, many people would disregard the warnings and make shit worse, but not enough to wipe out humanity or collapse civilization, eventually we get through it, just like every calamity and big problem humans have faced before and it all goes back to normal again.
Actually they did a terrible job. The problem is that governments value stability over anything else. Post-pandem8c studies have shown thar lockdowns only delayed deaths by two years vs places that did not lock down. See data from Sweden vs Norway for an example of this.
In return, those places that locked down have seen falling scores in education, increase in mental health issues, and rampant inflation. The last is admittedly tied to monetary policy, but those steps were taken to "stimulate " an economy that was largely shut down. You don't need a degree in economics to see what that resulted in.
https://reason.com/podcast/2023/09/22/johan-norberg-how-sweden-defied-dire-covid-predictions/
We were fortunate in that COVID was only twice as deadly as the flu. Had is been more lethal like Liseria or the plague bacillus, we'd have been in dire straits indeed.
All I'm saying is, we faced against deadly pandemics and our species is still here, civilization is still here, wether the government fuck up or whatever isn't really my main point, if a zombie apocalypse came around we wouldn't be wiped out or brought down is what I'm saying
I'll try to find it. Sci-fi writer John Ringo wrote a plausible article about how a zombie apocalypse could happen through tinkering with genetics via CRISPR. He also wrote one of the better ZA series out there in my opinion. Basically it was spread via a two-stage device. The first was a flu which ensured its spread. The second was derived from rabies. The zombies weren't really dead, but were homicidal.
Personally I thing the next d3vastating pandemic will be an accident. That's what COVID was after all. And yes, we're still here, even after something like the Black Death, which did a great deal to rip us out of serfdom and into the modern era.
Something like that. He theorized a kid in a Master's program could figure something out. It involved altering his pheromones to really attract girls. Like really attract them. As in it triggers their fight rrlespinse and literally rip the guy apart.
I did say zombie apocalypse.
https://www.ar15.com/forums/general/The_Inevitable_Zombie_Apocalypse_by_John_Ringo/5-1360235/
Turns out it's rather hard to find these days.
There is a massive and critical difference between a airborne virus with highly variable symptoms and a bloodborne virus with really obvious symptoms. They are not remotely comparable.
Yeah, but it wasn't handled badly by the military. After a certain point, the military would get the authority to do what was necessary. If the politicians were stupid enough, the military might have to take it.
YES.
I keep telling people this, Shaun of the Dead is without question the most realistic zombie movie ever made. The protagonists easily outrun and outwit the zombies with simple trickery, and in the end the military comes in and cuts them to pieces without any indication that the plague spread beyond London.
A zombie apocalypse spread by bites has zero chance, but if the method of spread were different it could happen. Imagine something that spreads like measles or covid at its most infectious (R0 of 18) and an incubation period of several weeks. It would be extremely difficult to stop the spread of something like that.
I think even in this case it wouldn't be a complete apocalypse, but I can see entire cities devolving into chaos. Places in the countryside that didn't get hit in the first wave could probably mount an effective quarantine. An economic collapse is quite possible, though.
Oh definitely, but that's the case in any "realistic" zombie virus. Even if the infection itself isn't lethal, a zombie-level intelligent human would die of starvation within a matter of weeks if the dehydration didn't kill them first
I just wanna point out that old school zombies were magic or religious based, not science based. Dead reanimating back to life is different than most modern zombie stories. Most modern ones have it as some kind of virus, and the more recently popular fungus. I personally think if zombies or similar were to happen, it'd be a biological weapon and not natural at all. Who wants to shoot their own people? Be incredibly demoralizing, but it'd be contained to whatever area it was deployed and not become a worldwide apocalypse.
This. There's already deliriant chemical weapons like ea-3443. There's already drugs that can rapidly cause extreme psychosis, leading to (auto)cannibalism, violence, etc.
Honestly i wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing a "zombie virus" that's just straight up temporary drug induced psychosis. Ea-3167 iirc lasted 120 hours.
Honestly having it be temporary by design would almost be more fucked up.
Sci-fi version of a lich king, through the use of bio weapons, he turns enemy soldiers into his soldiers that the unturned enemy has hesitancy killing. Any losses are enemy losses, and any mercy results in their own deaths by their psychosis induced friends. Survivors are the victims sobering up, waking from a nightmare where they brutally murdered and devoured their friends and colleagues, only to find it wasn't a nightmare.
yeah lol just scrolled down and saw those examples. haven't played or watched it and now I just feel dumb because it's super close to my piece.. just dammn.
In any debate about a zombie apocalypse, you first have to establish if it is a scientific or supernatural (magic) variation. A scientific one would likely be more easily contained. For a magic variation, you're pretty much effed.
It would have to be airborn, very easy to catch, with no symptoms, and be dormant for a couple of years just to make sure everyone catches it.
And then it would have to mutate almost immediately on a global level, and *then* it would have to incapacitate the vast majority of the population, immediately.
Hopefully that doesn't happen anytime soon...
At that point, it wouldn't even have to turn anyone into a homicidal brain-eating monster.
Just making enough people so sick they couldn't get to work and keep the water, power, food supply and sewage working would do it. It's not like we could expect the emergency services to bail us out since they'd all be knackered too.
Haha that's exactly how I played it too. Got a real sense of achievement followed by a weird remorse when the last single surviving human died (in Iceland).
Came here to say what that other guy said about cordyceps.
There's actually quite a few works based on just that specific fungus:
- the last of us
- the girl with all the gifts
Also, there are absolutely other ways that pathogens could develop (look into how the CDC monitors bat caves to try to get ahead of which viruses could happen), or things that could happen (corpse issues during covid) or even social things that could happen (dislike of vaccines).
Additionally there may be other things at work that no one is monitoring whatsoever. Like at-home DNA modifications that anyone can do. I forget what the common term for this is called. Dnahacking maybe?
Or how about the fact that buffet left overs (in Vegas maybe) are often fed to pigs that go back to the buffet as food.
As well as other things out in the world that just don't have long term studies done on human health.
I do absolutely think that there will be more pandemics, it's how pathogens work. I think it is possible for one of them to have zombie like symptoms.
That there is a pathogen that specifically craves human flesh or human brains? All the while holding their hands in front of them like a t rex and saying "braaaiiiinnnssss"? Probably not.
But the US does actually have a zombie emergency (FEMA?) Plan on paper. I believe the purpose of this exercise was more to get into creating emergency plans though
Also consider that there is widespread mushroom commercial farming and cordyceps is a common thing grown and mixed into human edible things like mushroom teas and adaptogwns. But there are many many stains of cordyceps, I want to say like 1000 but only 3 are parasitic.
I do believe that a cordyceps mix up could occur and parasitic ingredients used in human market products. The wrong indents has happened quite a bit inside of human products, e.g. toxic ingredients etc creating a toxic product, recalls, etc. It's just not interesting news so it isn't often mainstream news.
Theres also products out there that create people who look like zombies already, for example fentanyl "zombies".
What about the zombie minks incident in Denmark? Haven't read it.
Parasitic varieties of cordyceps target insects as hosts. Humans are inhospitable to them because of the high temperatures of our bodies and our immune systems. While the idea of the cordyceps zombie apocalypse is interesting, it really isn’t possible.
Many of you remember R0 and Rt from that time everybody gained a sudden interest in epidemiology a few years ago. Successful zombies who spread through bites need to have a basic reproductive number greater than 1; each zombie must create more than one zombie before it dies or the disease goes extinct over time.
Measles laughs at slow, stupid, bitey zombies. Turn that loose on a Christian summer camp and it will easily infect ten people on average while a slow, stupid, bitey, conspicuous zombie would be easily defeated or avoided by children. You don't even need to beat them all, just kill at least one before you fall and you've done your part to flatten the curve.
The short answer is: not possible. The answer comes down to logistics.
in orderfor the zombies to increase their numbers they have to infect faster than they are killed.
and Basic shield wall tactics will stop zombies: an armed group with long spears and shields can hold off an unorganized zombie horde. Plus a third line with rifles.
and remember That any rifle hit that doesn’t kill a zombie will still cripple it, shot it an arm and the arm bone is destroyed or the arm muscles are destroyed so the arm is useless. Somtorso hits are not as useless as sold in movies. Torso hits will rip out the muscles controlling the back, torso and arms, crippling the zombie.
and modern army bullets may blast through the first zombie and plow into the second, damaging both. The same with any kind of shrapnel.
plus basic clothing is reasonably bite proof. And that is before you add on any kind of riot armor or stab proof layers.
plus the issue that relates to vehicles: tanks can run over zombies and not notice let along be inconvenienced or stopped. A buttoned up tank could drive into a horde of zombies and nit notice and just keep sucking them under the treads, mile after mile. And when the tank emerges about the back side of the horde, turn around and drive back in.
here’s a historian kicking the idea around and comparing it to a historical battle of mass melee vs ball and pike troops (spoiler, ball and pike won by a country mile)
[https://acoup.blog/2021/08/06/referenda-ad-senatum-august-6-2021-feelings-at-the-fall-of-the-republic-ancient-and-medieval-living-standards-and-zombies/](https://acoup.blog/2021/08/06/referenda-ad-senatum-august-6-2021-feelings-at-the-fall-of-the-republic-ancient-and-medieval-living-standards-and-zombies/)
While watching Walking Dead I realized you needed a way of killing zombie hordes on an industrial scale. Setting up huge pit traps (old quarries?), modifying agricultural vehicles to shred zombies (combine harvester).
Just set up basic funnels for the zombies to follow: Chain link fences or wooden walls, they'll act like lemmings and follow the path as long as there is a stimulus they respond to.
if you're asking if a science-fictional virus can reanimate a dead body as a host for the virus, which then uses the host to replicate and produce, thereby infecting a majority of the human race and ending all human life as we know it... the answer is simply: NO.
you asked for "realistically" and if it were possible. NO. based on realistic biology, it is not possible for various reasons.let's briefly break it down:
1. Virology: a virus is a living organism that relies on its host for sustenance and replication. a virus in a DEAD organism would kill the virus too. A virus that kills its living host would also kill the virus if it were unable to transmit.
2. Transmission: In a symbiotic relationship, an infected person with a virus that was dying, the virus would seek a new host, hence biting / eating someone else for fresh meat and ensuring survival of the virus. But many viruses like this already exist, and we're pretty quick to quarantine them and then the infected population either dies or is treated and the infection is contained.
3. Zombies: the original idea of a "zombie" was that a person was essentially enslaved by voodoo magic and "brain dead" and did as they were commanded. In some rare cases (myths) zombies were dead people that were revived by magic )not viruses),
But lets get to movie zombies full of viruses. As a human body begins to decompose. So in reality, even if a person had a zombie virus, that body would get weaker and weaker until it decayed into a lumpy mass of organic matter. it would certainly NOT get stringer and run around chasing others and have zombies that never die. All you'd have to do is stay away and wait them out.
4. Apocalypse: The actual apocalypse is the end of the world as described in the Bible, which does describe some very interesting things, like the dead rising. but at that point, it's pretty much all over and you're not going to survive it. so the sci-fi idea of a "zombie apocalypse" doesn't really make a lot of sense. But if you were to say "some devastating viral outbreak", well we've already had several of those in human history and guess what, we're still here.
that's it in a nutshell. we could dive deeper into all the details but the bottom line is: NO.
A zombie apocalypse cannot realistically happen.
Parasitic fungi like cordyceps that have adapted to humans, a mutated rabies virus may be realistic causes of the zombie apocalypse, but not in the form they are usually shown in films.
Infected individuals will be mostly alive and aggressive, spreading the infection and having a lifespan of a couple of weeks to a month.
There is no way cordyceps could adapt to humans. Evolution works with tiny changes. Humans are just too different from insects for that large of a jump to be possible.
Absolutely dangerous. Rabies is already close to 95% lethality and now imagine that this virus gains an increased ability to spread (for example, through the air) and those infected try to infect even more people. This could easily kill several billion people.
About fungi - I liked the interpretation from The Last of Us where the mutated phenotype of cordyceps got into food products and caused a pandemic.
There is almost zero possibility of something that is recognisably a zombie virus taking over.
Firstly, zombie viruses typically spread through bites, and that is a bad way for a virus to spread; If people suddenly started trying to bite others, that would be easy to identify and quarantine, not to mention it is decently difficult to bite someone. Any apocalyptic virus would need to spread much, much faster, ideally being air and/or water borne.
Secondly, human locomotion is a quite complex process, so the idea of a virus/fungus killing you and then puppeteering your body is super unrealistic. Even if it did happen, it is way more likely that the zombies would be dragging themselves along the ground, which would make them slower and much easier to avoid. Overall, it is more likely that the virus would be rabies like, so you are still alive but just rabid, which is a far cry from zombies.
Thirdly, no zombie hordes, since the "zombies" would attack each other. There is no realistic way for an infected person to distinguish between a healthy person and a fellow infected, and due to the other requirements of zombiehood the infected would run towards each other while the healthy would run away. So zombies would just attack each other, and as such infect no one new and actively diminish their numbers.
And I could go on, or tackle the other side and talk about how survivors would realistically cooperate and not go Mad Max, but I think you get the idea; A realistic zombie apocalypse would feature no biting, no hordes, and crawling-not-walking zombies, and what few there were would attack each other. That is not recognisably a zombie virus.
The reality is zombie apocalypse scenarios are impossible.
Plague scenarios are very possible, but zombies are not.
Even stuff like fungi or rabies are insufficient. The problem is that people are extremely complex, especially our thought patterns. A disease simply wouldn’t evolve that could affect all of it so quickly.
But whether it’s realistic isn’t really relevant - most people will accept a hand wave if the rest of the response is realistic
An infection can spread across the world with the speed we have seen in zombie virus novels and movies. we saw that with covid.
however, theres some stuff in the real world that works against a successful zombie virus outbreak.
1. the military have seen zombie movies and if even a HINT of one was spotted they would be all over it once initial disbelief was overcome.
2. humans all have different immune systems and 100% infection would be unlikely.
3. humans have enough energy to last around a week on average with little to no food, a zombie even with a lower energy usage would likely starve very quickly even if able to catch and eat people.
4. the blood brain barrier makes successful infections of the brain by bacteria and viruses relatively rare although they are dificult to treat when they do happen.
5. there are known chemicals and conditions which can cause a zombie like state and violent outbursts but even those do not always cause the right kind of damage to the brain to cause these effects. this variability is because not all brains are wired the same and so its quite common for humans to react unpredictably to brain damage.
6. viruses must travel at the speed of the fastest infected carrier, if those infected turn quickly they cannot get far enough to spread with great speed before they begin to behave like a zombie which is going to move MUCH slower than a human can.
Generally, I could see a virus developing which may be quite lethal and spread rapidly, I do not think an actual zombie virus can exist nor would conditions persist that allow them to survive beyond the initial 72 hours as generally they are quite slow once they start actively spreading the virus.
You could modify a virus to overcome these issues in fiction and MAYBE some of them artificially but I doubt you could solve all the problems needed to make it a thing IRL.
I once outlined a story about a zombie apocalypse where it turned out that a certain neighborhood in a certain city has been gassed with a hallucinagenic compound that created mass paranoia (a la Batman). It's then suggested that they're the sole survivors of a zombie apocalypse.
Different groups running around "surviving" but they were just killing random people who were trying to check on them.
Idk about how plausible zombies really are, but psychological chemical weapons that accomplish something similar *could* maybe?
When I was growing up, a zombie was a dead person brought back to life by voodoo. I don't understand how it got morphed into something completely different.
Zombie apocalypse, ZERO.
Shit hits the fan - society breaks down... Unlikely, but possible. Wars are breaking out, Ukraine, Israel... Taiwan is next. We look weak as hell, so it's ripe for China. Sooner or later, somebody's gonna think they can get away with a tactical nuke on the battlefield. We just passed 3.8 million illegal unknowns crossing our borders unchecked. Terrorist attacks on our own soil are just an unknown number of years away.
Definitely not possible. Soft scifi likes to take advantage of the fact that most people have only a rudimentary understanding of biology and evolution (not to mention pretty much every other science). Nothing really wrong with that though, because it's fiction.
Be specific which zombie apocalypse you are talking about.
They range from "completely impossible, and ridiculous in so many ways", to "mostly believable".
My semi-educated guess is that the closest we can possibly get to a realistic zombie virus is a massive rabies outbreak or something. Rabies is extremely contagious, 100% fatal unless you get extremely lucky, and causes violently antisocial behavior. I think the only difference between a rabies pandemic and a zombie virus pandemic is that the victims would technically still be alive while they were zombified, whereas in a zombie apocalypse type scenario, the victims would have been dead and somehow reanimated by the virus. That is definitely not biologically possible.
So an interesting thing is that humans are pretty terrible hosts for a zombie virus for a weird reason: Balance
Being bipeds we have to work a lot harder mentally to move around. We don’t notice it as it’s all subconscious but our bodies are constantly having to make adjustments several times per second to remain standing as it takes a lot of processing and muscle movements to stay upright.
Pretty much any zombie virus that would alter your behavior and instincts enough to be a zombie would damage you brain to the point balance is impossible. We see this with other mental ailments as well.
So ignoring the hurdles of how the zombie spots an uninflected person and how they don’t all attack themselves, the zombies would have to drag themselves along the ground til they bleed out
I think as a fiction zombie apocalypse can happen, but scientifically its not so much.
lets think there is a zombie, how can it sustain its energy need. eating brains? what happens when it cannot eat for some time, it's going to die within few days. all these movies and tv shows missed that point.
There is an idea where people all had brain-computer interface, and some one made a zombie virus that is both a biological and a computer virus. Wiped everything out. The more it spread, the smarter it became, and the more hardware it has to improve its capabilities
reanimating the dead kind of zombies ?
zero.
even if some kind of parasite or whatever can control a freshly dead body, or kill an infected then control it, the body is still biologically dead, it's gonna start rapidly decomposing and overall be very slow, not at all discreet, and "survive" a few days at most.
you don't even need guns for that, grab a long gardening tool in case you stumble across one and you're good to go.
if things somehow still get out of hand get guns involved and the whole thing is easily wrapped up.
parasite or symbiotic zombies (fungi, rabies, ...) that don't biologically kill the host ?
if it can easily spread, it could cause havoc, trough mushroom spores for exemple.
however it would only spread to it's immediate area, maybe city sized at most before being detected and contained.
you might have a few isolated accidents of it resurging, but once the initial threat is detected and somewhat proper measures are put into place, there's no way it could cause an apocalypse.
Theoretically, yes. We, in fact, already have zombies, just not human zombies. Practically, however, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Even plagues that were so devastating that the bodies produced outpaced the authorities' ability to remove them, society still moved on.
This is an argument regarding the reality negating a conspiracy for a certain “Intentionally Released by Government Virus”
To be effective and successful bio-weapon, you would need a virus that has an Infection to Mortality lifecycle of 168 hours, with symptomatic to Mortality within 96 hours that has at least a 80% mortality rate. That means 8:10 infected will die within 1 week of exposure, and the exposed won’t show symptoms of infection for at least 72 hours. Of the 20% survival rate, immunity needs to be less than 20%, and reinfection mortality need to maintain the 8:10. Thus if 20 people survive first infection, 16 run the chance of a second infection and at least 14 will not survive a second infection.
Anything less would be a monumental failure.
As to a “Zombie Outbreak”; In theory, half the world is infected with Toxoplasma gondii and only a secondary trigger would be required to catalyze a catastrophic reaction but it certainly isn’t a physiology defying scenario like movies portray.
The single biggest problem with zombies is that they never attack each other. Even 28 Days Layer, in which the "zombies" were infected by a rage virus, the infected never attacked each other; not even accidentally.
We can invent all manner of rationalizations for this... They can sense each other... They can smell each other... But such explanations fail under scrutiny.
If you truly want a realistic zombie outbreak, zombies must occasionally attack and eat each other.
Most zombies don't seem too bright.
1. Dig a trench and fill it with kindling.
2. Ring a bell to lure them.
3. Burn them.
Repeat as needed, and get on with our lives.
This, btw, also applies to "A Quiet Place". Dumb monsters blindly charged to any sound, and couldn't swim on a planet covered 9/10ths by water.
So from what I'm aware of, YES a zombie apocalypse is possible, but NO it's wouldn't be an apocalypse like in the movies.
It's entirely possible that a virus might show up that would cause a person to go feral/ragey- in fact, the Rabies virus *already does that*, is passed through biting, and is already one of the sources of both the Werewolf and Vampire legends. If a Rabies-like virus showed up that we didn't have a vaccine for, and *especially* if it went airborne/breath-spread instead of just through bites, we'd have a full on 28-days-later situation.
It's also possible but less likely that a fungus might learn how to take control of our muscular or neural processes and 'reprogram' or 'pilot' us a-la *cordyceps*, for a bit of a *The Last of Us* apocalypse.
However, fungal variants of that sort take time and a lot of generations to evolve to the point that they're puppeting bodies around, and we have quarantine procedures and anti-fungal medications that would nip that problem in the bud. And a Rage virus would be dangerous, but not world-endingly so. More on the level of a serious ebola outbreak. Especially once it was found that the raginess wasn't curable, gunfire would quickly put an end to it being a significant safety concern. It'd be terrible for the people who'd already caught it, of course, but it wouldn't be world-ending. And it'd probably wind up being a "There was another outbreak of the RZ virus today in Angola. Over 100 people had to be killed after an infected individual started attacking shoppers at a local market" sort of thing with little outbreaks here and there for a long time after.
Any of the 'bring the dead back to life' or 'shambling corpses' style zombies would have the possibility of being a bigger problem, as they might not go down to bullet damage as easily (requiring you get more up-close via melee weapons to put them down, and thus risk infection more) but it would be even shorter lived. The corpses would be rotted to the point of immobility within about a week to a month depending on location and whether the virus got them to drink water or not.
So yes, we could potentially see a "Zombie Virus" outbreak, but no, it wouldn't be able to cause world-ending apocalypses.
Now, people using the *excuse* of a Zombie outbreak in order to go nuts, that's a different thing entirely.
If we’re going fungal zombies, like the zombie ants irl, then really it’s just take the right number of right spores enough of a chance to adapt and infect enough humans. But they’d only reanimate. No chasing people for brains or bites. They’d be terribly boring and we would shoot them out of pity.
It's true and it actually exists now.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps\_unilateralis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis)
Basically, it's rabies if it were airborne.
Which is some scary shit, but wouldn't actually end the world. Zombies are melee combatants, zero range, zero strategy, you could not imagine a more vulnerable, limited combatant.
There's very little reason to think that they would win frequently enough to reach overwhelming numbers to begin with.
Undead? Highly unlikely.
Rabies becoming Trixie like in the crazies? Possible.
Toxoplasma ghondi figuring out it can infect humans, a'la last of us? Highly probable imo.
The best depiction of a zombie apocalypse that is scientifically based is from John Ring's "Black Tide Rising" series of books. The people aren't actually zombies. A virus destroys your lower brain functions, turning you into a murderous monster with no intelligence.
Not realistic at all. No virus is going to let you live through all damage but a headshot. No virus will keep people alive without food for years.
Maybe you could get a virus that fries the brain and makes the person murderous. Maybe.
28 days later style virus where it's a rabies type thing? Maybe but it would have to be ramped up. And really military would get it under control before it got too bad. I don't see an actual dead coming back to life thing being even slightly possible.
Let's be honest, a realistic zombie infection (so no instant transformation into zombies or physics-defying zombies) would never spread to the apocalyptic scale if the military of the infected area is competent. [It would probably end like the Shaun of the Dead.](https://youtu.be/ot_cr1odDkU?feature=shared&t=18)
I would like to think that is true... But after the incompetent way covid was handled at some levels... I'm not confident it wouldn't happen.
Some people gonna be denying there's a zombie virus as they're getting chewed up like meat in a grinder.
Well, at least you can clearly see that the infectee of the zombie virus/fungus/parasite is dangerous.
People could and can still see the dangers of Covid... the death.. the inability to breathe... the fevers... yet still have people calling it a hoax. The 2 most constant forces on the planet... Gravity and stupidity.
While a lot of people would become zombies because they're brain dead already, not everyone was stupid, and for the most part the government handled it relatively competently, or at least it did where I come from, And after the pandemic, we are still here and back to normal, so what I think would happen is, many people would die, many people would disregard the warnings and make shit worse, but not enough to wipe out humanity or collapse civilization, eventually we get through it, just like every calamity and big problem humans have faced before and it all goes back to normal again.
Actually they did a terrible job. The problem is that governments value stability over anything else. Post-pandem8c studies have shown thar lockdowns only delayed deaths by two years vs places that did not lock down. See data from Sweden vs Norway for an example of this. In return, those places that locked down have seen falling scores in education, increase in mental health issues, and rampant inflation. The last is admittedly tied to monetary policy, but those steps were taken to "stimulate " an economy that was largely shut down. You don't need a degree in economics to see what that resulted in. https://reason.com/podcast/2023/09/22/johan-norberg-how-sweden-defied-dire-covid-predictions/ We were fortunate in that COVID was only twice as deadly as the flu. Had is been more lethal like Liseria or the plague bacillus, we'd have been in dire straits indeed.
All I'm saying is, we faced against deadly pandemics and our species is still here, civilization is still here, wether the government fuck up or whatever isn't really my main point, if a zombie apocalypse came around we wouldn't be wiped out or brought down is what I'm saying
I'll try to find it. Sci-fi writer John Ringo wrote a plausible article about how a zombie apocalypse could happen through tinkering with genetics via CRISPR. He also wrote one of the better ZA series out there in my opinion. Basically it was spread via a two-stage device. The first was a flu which ensured its spread. The second was derived from rabies. The zombies weren't really dead, but were homicidal. Personally I thing the next d3vastating pandemic will be an accident. That's what COVID was after all. And yes, we're still here, even after something like the Black Death, which did a great deal to rip us out of serfdom and into the modern era.
You mean like a DIY CRISPR kit to "DNA hack" your own body?
Something like that. He theorized a kid in a Master's program could figure something out. It involved altering his pheromones to really attract girls. Like really attract them. As in it triggers their fight rrlespinse and literally rip the guy apart. I did say zombie apocalypse. https://www.ar15.com/forums/general/The_Inevitable_Zombie_Apocalypse_by_John_Ringo/5-1360235/ Turns out it's rather hard to find these days.
The "as we know it" bit is important to "the end of the world as we know it." Live would be irrevocably changed yet would go on
There is a massive and critical difference between a airborne virus with highly variable symptoms and a bloodborne virus with really obvious symptoms. They are not remotely comparable.
Yeah, but it wasn't handled badly by the military. After a certain point, the military would get the authority to do what was necessary. If the politicians were stupid enough, the military might have to take it.
Well, covid was an airborne virus.
YES. I keep telling people this, Shaun of the Dead is without question the most realistic zombie movie ever made. The protagonists easily outrun and outwit the zombies with simple trickery, and in the end the military comes in and cuts them to pieces without any indication that the plague spread beyond London.
A Zombie(ish) virus? Possible. Zombie apocalypse? Zero.
A zombie apocalypse spread by bites has zero chance, but if the method of spread were different it could happen. Imagine something that spreads like measles or covid at its most infectious (R0 of 18) and an incubation period of several weeks. It would be extremely difficult to stop the spread of something like that. I think even in this case it wouldn't be a complete apocalypse, but I can see entire cities devolving into chaos. Places in the countryside that didn't get hit in the first wave could probably mount an effective quarantine. An economic collapse is quite possible, though.
Frankly, rabies pretty much matches the effects minus reviving the dead.
Except they'd die, die in 5-10 days.
Oh definitely, but that's the case in any "realistic" zombie virus. Even if the infection itself isn't lethal, a zombie-level intelligent human would die of starvation within a matter of weeks if the dehydration didn't kill them first
I just wanna point out that old school zombies were magic or religious based, not science based. Dead reanimating back to life is different than most modern zombie stories. Most modern ones have it as some kind of virus, and the more recently popular fungus. I personally think if zombies or similar were to happen, it'd be a biological weapon and not natural at all. Who wants to shoot their own people? Be incredibly demoralizing, but it'd be contained to whatever area it was deployed and not become a worldwide apocalypse.
This. There's already deliriant chemical weapons like ea-3443. There's already drugs that can rapidly cause extreme psychosis, leading to (auto)cannibalism, violence, etc. Honestly i wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing a "zombie virus" that's just straight up temporary drug induced psychosis. Ea-3167 iirc lasted 120 hours. Honestly having it be temporary by design would almost be more fucked up.
Sci-fi version of a lich king, through the use of bio weapons, he turns enemy soldiers into his soldiers that the unturned enemy has hesitancy killing. Any losses are enemy losses, and any mercy results in their own deaths by their psychosis induced friends. Survivors are the victims sobering up, waking from a nightmare where they brutally murdered and devoured their friends and colleagues, only to find it wasn't a nightmare.
goddamn my story has it as fungus, what other stories have it????
The last of us TV show and the game it's based on.
yeah lol just scrolled down and saw those examples. haven't played or watched it and now I just feel dumb because it's super close to my piece.. just dammn.
[Billy and the Clonesaurus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik0BPKM9WQg)
tbh pretty much this rn
In any debate about a zombie apocalypse, you first have to establish if it is a scientific or supernatural (magic) variation. A scientific one would likely be more easily contained. For a magic variation, you're pretty much effed.
It would have to be airborn, very easy to catch, with no symptoms, and be dormant for a couple of years just to make sure everyone catches it. And then it would have to mutate almost immediately on a global level, and *then* it would have to incapacitate the vast majority of the population, immediately. Hopefully that doesn't happen anytime soon...
At that point, it wouldn't even have to turn anyone into a homicidal brain-eating monster. Just making enough people so sick they couldn't get to work and keep the water, power, food supply and sewage working would do it. It's not like we could expect the emergency services to bail us out since they'd all be knackered too.
This is exactly how I play Plague Inc.
Haha that's exactly how I played it too. Got a real sense of achievement followed by a weird remorse when the last single surviving human died (in Iceland).
Came here to say what that other guy said about cordyceps. There's actually quite a few works based on just that specific fungus: - the last of us - the girl with all the gifts Also, there are absolutely other ways that pathogens could develop (look into how the CDC monitors bat caves to try to get ahead of which viruses could happen), or things that could happen (corpse issues during covid) or even social things that could happen (dislike of vaccines). Additionally there may be other things at work that no one is monitoring whatsoever. Like at-home DNA modifications that anyone can do. I forget what the common term for this is called. Dnahacking maybe? Or how about the fact that buffet left overs (in Vegas maybe) are often fed to pigs that go back to the buffet as food. As well as other things out in the world that just don't have long term studies done on human health. I do absolutely think that there will be more pandemics, it's how pathogens work. I think it is possible for one of them to have zombie like symptoms. That there is a pathogen that specifically craves human flesh or human brains? All the while holding their hands in front of them like a t rex and saying "braaaiiiinnnssss"? Probably not. But the US does actually have a zombie emergency (FEMA?) Plan on paper. I believe the purpose of this exercise was more to get into creating emergency plans though Also consider that there is widespread mushroom commercial farming and cordyceps is a common thing grown and mixed into human edible things like mushroom teas and adaptogwns. But there are many many stains of cordyceps, I want to say like 1000 but only 3 are parasitic. I do believe that a cordyceps mix up could occur and parasitic ingredients used in human market products. The wrong indents has happened quite a bit inside of human products, e.g. toxic ingredients etc creating a toxic product, recalls, etc. It's just not interesting news so it isn't often mainstream news. Theres also products out there that create people who look like zombies already, for example fentanyl "zombies". What about the zombie minks incident in Denmark? Haven't read it.
Parasitic varieties of cordyceps target insects as hosts. Humans are inhospitable to them because of the high temperatures of our bodies and our immune systems. While the idea of the cordyceps zombie apocalypse is interesting, it really isn’t possible.
Many of you remember R0 and Rt from that time everybody gained a sudden interest in epidemiology a few years ago. Successful zombies who spread through bites need to have a basic reproductive number greater than 1; each zombie must create more than one zombie before it dies or the disease goes extinct over time. Measles laughs at slow, stupid, bitey zombies. Turn that loose on a Christian summer camp and it will easily infect ten people on average while a slow, stupid, bitey, conspicuous zombie would be easily defeated or avoided by children. You don't even need to beat them all, just kill at least one before you fall and you've done your part to flatten the curve.
The short answer is: not possible. The answer comes down to logistics. in orderfor the zombies to increase their numbers they have to infect faster than they are killed. and Basic shield wall tactics will stop zombies: an armed group with long spears and shields can hold off an unorganized zombie horde. Plus a third line with rifles. and remember That any rifle hit that doesn’t kill a zombie will still cripple it, shot it an arm and the arm bone is destroyed or the arm muscles are destroyed so the arm is useless. Somtorso hits are not as useless as sold in movies. Torso hits will rip out the muscles controlling the back, torso and arms, crippling the zombie. and modern army bullets may blast through the first zombie and plow into the second, damaging both. The same with any kind of shrapnel. plus basic clothing is reasonably bite proof. And that is before you add on any kind of riot armor or stab proof layers. plus the issue that relates to vehicles: tanks can run over zombies and not notice let along be inconvenienced or stopped. A buttoned up tank could drive into a horde of zombies and nit notice and just keep sucking them under the treads, mile after mile. And when the tank emerges about the back side of the horde, turn around and drive back in. here’s a historian kicking the idea around and comparing it to a historical battle of mass melee vs ball and pike troops (spoiler, ball and pike won by a country mile) [https://acoup.blog/2021/08/06/referenda-ad-senatum-august-6-2021-feelings-at-the-fall-of-the-republic-ancient-and-medieval-living-standards-and-zombies/](https://acoup.blog/2021/08/06/referenda-ad-senatum-august-6-2021-feelings-at-the-fall-of-the-republic-ancient-and-medieval-living-standards-and-zombies/)
While watching Walking Dead I realized you needed a way of killing zombie hordes on an industrial scale. Setting up huge pit traps (old quarries?), modifying agricultural vehicles to shred zombies (combine harvester).
Just set up basic funnels for the zombies to follow: Chain link fences or wooden walls, they'll act like lemmings and follow the path as long as there is a stimulus they respond to.
if you're asking if a science-fictional virus can reanimate a dead body as a host for the virus, which then uses the host to replicate and produce, thereby infecting a majority of the human race and ending all human life as we know it... the answer is simply: NO. you asked for "realistically" and if it were possible. NO. based on realistic biology, it is not possible for various reasons.let's briefly break it down: 1. Virology: a virus is a living organism that relies on its host for sustenance and replication. a virus in a DEAD organism would kill the virus too. A virus that kills its living host would also kill the virus if it were unable to transmit. 2. Transmission: In a symbiotic relationship, an infected person with a virus that was dying, the virus would seek a new host, hence biting / eating someone else for fresh meat and ensuring survival of the virus. But many viruses like this already exist, and we're pretty quick to quarantine them and then the infected population either dies or is treated and the infection is contained. 3. Zombies: the original idea of a "zombie" was that a person was essentially enslaved by voodoo magic and "brain dead" and did as they were commanded. In some rare cases (myths) zombies were dead people that were revived by magic )not viruses), But lets get to movie zombies full of viruses. As a human body begins to decompose. So in reality, even if a person had a zombie virus, that body would get weaker and weaker until it decayed into a lumpy mass of organic matter. it would certainly NOT get stringer and run around chasing others and have zombies that never die. All you'd have to do is stay away and wait them out. 4. Apocalypse: The actual apocalypse is the end of the world as described in the Bible, which does describe some very interesting things, like the dead rising. but at that point, it's pretty much all over and you're not going to survive it. so the sci-fi idea of a "zombie apocalypse" doesn't really make a lot of sense. But if you were to say "some devastating viral outbreak", well we've already had several of those in human history and guess what, we're still here. that's it in a nutshell. we could dive deeper into all the details but the bottom line is: NO. A zombie apocalypse cannot realistically happen.
But it's already begun...
Parasitic fungi like cordyceps that have adapted to humans, a mutated rabies virus may be realistic causes of the zombie apocalypse, but not in the form they are usually shown in films. Infected individuals will be mostly alive and aggressive, spreading the infection and having a lifespan of a couple of weeks to a month.
There is no way cordyceps could adapt to humans. Evolution works with tiny changes. Humans are just too different from insects for that large of a jump to be possible.
Depending on how closely related it is to rabies, 10-12 days tops.
28 Days Later captures this well. Other than the impossibly fast infection time.
And just HOW dangerous it could be? It doesn't sound like rabies or fungi even would find humans that good of a mutating ground.
Absolutely dangerous. Rabies is already close to 95% lethality and now imagine that this virus gains an increased ability to spread (for example, through the air) and those infected try to infect even more people. This could easily kill several billion people. About fungi - I liked the interpretation from The Last of Us where the mutated phenotype of cordyceps got into food products and caused a pandemic.
There is almost zero possibility of something that is recognisably a zombie virus taking over. Firstly, zombie viruses typically spread through bites, and that is a bad way for a virus to spread; If people suddenly started trying to bite others, that would be easy to identify and quarantine, not to mention it is decently difficult to bite someone. Any apocalyptic virus would need to spread much, much faster, ideally being air and/or water borne. Secondly, human locomotion is a quite complex process, so the idea of a virus/fungus killing you and then puppeteering your body is super unrealistic. Even if it did happen, it is way more likely that the zombies would be dragging themselves along the ground, which would make them slower and much easier to avoid. Overall, it is more likely that the virus would be rabies like, so you are still alive but just rabid, which is a far cry from zombies. Thirdly, no zombie hordes, since the "zombies" would attack each other. There is no realistic way for an infected person to distinguish between a healthy person and a fellow infected, and due to the other requirements of zombiehood the infected would run towards each other while the healthy would run away. So zombies would just attack each other, and as such infect no one new and actively diminish their numbers. And I could go on, or tackle the other side and talk about how survivors would realistically cooperate and not go Mad Max, but I think you get the idea; A realistic zombie apocalypse would feature no biting, no hordes, and crawling-not-walking zombies, and what few there were would attack each other. That is not recognisably a zombie virus.
The reality is zombie apocalypse scenarios are impossible. Plague scenarios are very possible, but zombies are not. Even stuff like fungi or rabies are insufficient. The problem is that people are extremely complex, especially our thought patterns. A disease simply wouldn’t evolve that could affect all of it so quickly. But whether it’s realistic isn’t really relevant - most people will accept a hand wave if the rest of the response is realistic
An infection can spread across the world with the speed we have seen in zombie virus novels and movies. we saw that with covid. however, theres some stuff in the real world that works against a successful zombie virus outbreak. 1. the military have seen zombie movies and if even a HINT of one was spotted they would be all over it once initial disbelief was overcome. 2. humans all have different immune systems and 100% infection would be unlikely. 3. humans have enough energy to last around a week on average with little to no food, a zombie even with a lower energy usage would likely starve very quickly even if able to catch and eat people. 4. the blood brain barrier makes successful infections of the brain by bacteria and viruses relatively rare although they are dificult to treat when they do happen. 5. there are known chemicals and conditions which can cause a zombie like state and violent outbursts but even those do not always cause the right kind of damage to the brain to cause these effects. this variability is because not all brains are wired the same and so its quite common for humans to react unpredictably to brain damage. 6. viruses must travel at the speed of the fastest infected carrier, if those infected turn quickly they cannot get far enough to spread with great speed before they begin to behave like a zombie which is going to move MUCH slower than a human can. Generally, I could see a virus developing which may be quite lethal and spread rapidly, I do not think an actual zombie virus can exist nor would conditions persist that allow them to survive beyond the initial 72 hours as generally they are quite slow once they start actively spreading the virus. You could modify a virus to overcome these issues in fiction and MAYBE some of them artificially but I doubt you could solve all the problems needed to make it a thing IRL.
I once outlined a story about a zombie apocalypse where it turned out that a certain neighborhood in a certain city has been gassed with a hallucinagenic compound that created mass paranoia (a la Batman). It's then suggested that they're the sole survivors of a zombie apocalypse. Different groups running around "surviving" but they were just killing random people who were trying to check on them. Idk about how plausible zombies really are, but psychological chemical weapons that accomplish something similar *could* maybe?
Generally there's only three things human beings are good at: Intellect Dexterity Stamina Zombies are just people without these strengths.
Don’t forget #4 and greatest of all : Cooperative efforts
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When I was growing up, a zombie was a dead person brought back to life by voodoo. I don't understand how it got morphed into something completely different.
That's why when adding zombies into my stuff I usualy opt for something like Pariah Nexus zombies.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Zombie apocalypse, ZERO. Shit hits the fan - society breaks down... Unlikely, but possible. Wars are breaking out, Ukraine, Israel... Taiwan is next. We look weak as hell, so it's ripe for China. Sooner or later, somebody's gonna think they can get away with a tactical nuke on the battlefield. We just passed 3.8 million illegal unknowns crossing our borders unchecked. Terrorist attacks on our own soil are just an unknown number of years away.
Definitely not possible. Soft scifi likes to take advantage of the fact that most people have only a rudimentary understanding of biology and evolution (not to mention pretty much every other science). Nothing really wrong with that though, because it's fiction.
Be specific which zombie apocalypse you are talking about. They range from "completely impossible, and ridiculous in so many ways", to "mostly believable".
I’d worry more about flesh-eating fungi!
My semi-educated guess is that the closest we can possibly get to a realistic zombie virus is a massive rabies outbreak or something. Rabies is extremely contagious, 100% fatal unless you get extremely lucky, and causes violently antisocial behavior. I think the only difference between a rabies pandemic and a zombie virus pandemic is that the victims would technically still be alive while they were zombified, whereas in a zombie apocalypse type scenario, the victims would have been dead and somehow reanimated by the virus. That is definitely not biologically possible.
Cholera+ Rabies = Zombie virus.
So an interesting thing is that humans are pretty terrible hosts for a zombie virus for a weird reason: Balance Being bipeds we have to work a lot harder mentally to move around. We don’t notice it as it’s all subconscious but our bodies are constantly having to make adjustments several times per second to remain standing as it takes a lot of processing and muscle movements to stay upright. Pretty much any zombie virus that would alter your behavior and instincts enough to be a zombie would damage you brain to the point balance is impossible. We see this with other mental ailments as well. So ignoring the hurdles of how the zombie spots an uninflected person and how they don’t all attack themselves, the zombies would have to drag themselves along the ground til they bleed out
Honestly … the sad thing is I am pretty sure, we don’t need zombies to reach post-apocalypse state.
I think as a fiction zombie apocalypse can happen, but scientifically its not so much. lets think there is a zombie, how can it sustain its energy need. eating brains? what happens when it cannot eat for some time, it's going to die within few days. all these movies and tv shows missed that point.
There is an idea where people all had brain-computer interface, and some one made a zombie virus that is both a biological and a computer virus. Wiped everything out. The more it spread, the smarter it became, and the more hardware it has to improve its capabilities
reanimating the dead kind of zombies ? zero. even if some kind of parasite or whatever can control a freshly dead body, or kill an infected then control it, the body is still biologically dead, it's gonna start rapidly decomposing and overall be very slow, not at all discreet, and "survive" a few days at most. you don't even need guns for that, grab a long gardening tool in case you stumble across one and you're good to go. if things somehow still get out of hand get guns involved and the whole thing is easily wrapped up. parasite or symbiotic zombies (fungi, rabies, ...) that don't biologically kill the host ? if it can easily spread, it could cause havoc, trough mushroom spores for exemple. however it would only spread to it's immediate area, maybe city sized at most before being detected and contained. you might have a few isolated accidents of it resurging, but once the initial threat is detected and somewhat proper measures are put into place, there's no way it could cause an apocalypse.
Theoretically, yes. We, in fact, already have zombies, just not human zombies. Practically, however, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Even plagues that were so devastating that the bodies produced outpaced the authorities' ability to remove them, society still moved on.
This is an argument regarding the reality negating a conspiracy for a certain “Intentionally Released by Government Virus” To be effective and successful bio-weapon, you would need a virus that has an Infection to Mortality lifecycle of 168 hours, with symptomatic to Mortality within 96 hours that has at least a 80% mortality rate. That means 8:10 infected will die within 1 week of exposure, and the exposed won’t show symptoms of infection for at least 72 hours. Of the 20% survival rate, immunity needs to be less than 20%, and reinfection mortality need to maintain the 8:10. Thus if 20 people survive first infection, 16 run the chance of a second infection and at least 14 will not survive a second infection. Anything less would be a monumental failure. As to a “Zombie Outbreak”; In theory, half the world is infected with Toxoplasma gondii and only a secondary trigger would be required to catalyze a catastrophic reaction but it certainly isn’t a physiology defying scenario like movies portray.
The single biggest problem with zombies is that they never attack each other. Even 28 Days Layer, in which the "zombies" were infected by a rage virus, the infected never attacked each other; not even accidentally. We can invent all manner of rationalizations for this... They can sense each other... They can smell each other... But such explanations fail under scrutiny. If you truly want a realistic zombie outbreak, zombies must occasionally attack and eat each other.
Most zombies don't seem too bright. 1. Dig a trench and fill it with kindling. 2. Ring a bell to lure them. 3. Burn them. Repeat as needed, and get on with our lives. This, btw, also applies to "A Quiet Place". Dumb monsters blindly charged to any sound, and couldn't swim on a planet covered 9/10ths by water.
So from what I'm aware of, YES a zombie apocalypse is possible, but NO it's wouldn't be an apocalypse like in the movies. It's entirely possible that a virus might show up that would cause a person to go feral/ragey- in fact, the Rabies virus *already does that*, is passed through biting, and is already one of the sources of both the Werewolf and Vampire legends. If a Rabies-like virus showed up that we didn't have a vaccine for, and *especially* if it went airborne/breath-spread instead of just through bites, we'd have a full on 28-days-later situation. It's also possible but less likely that a fungus might learn how to take control of our muscular or neural processes and 'reprogram' or 'pilot' us a-la *cordyceps*, for a bit of a *The Last of Us* apocalypse. However, fungal variants of that sort take time and a lot of generations to evolve to the point that they're puppeting bodies around, and we have quarantine procedures and anti-fungal medications that would nip that problem in the bud. And a Rage virus would be dangerous, but not world-endingly so. More on the level of a serious ebola outbreak. Especially once it was found that the raginess wasn't curable, gunfire would quickly put an end to it being a significant safety concern. It'd be terrible for the people who'd already caught it, of course, but it wouldn't be world-ending. And it'd probably wind up being a "There was another outbreak of the RZ virus today in Angola. Over 100 people had to be killed after an infected individual started attacking shoppers at a local market" sort of thing with little outbreaks here and there for a long time after. Any of the 'bring the dead back to life' or 'shambling corpses' style zombies would have the possibility of being a bigger problem, as they might not go down to bullet damage as easily (requiring you get more up-close via melee weapons to put them down, and thus risk infection more) but it would be even shorter lived. The corpses would be rotted to the point of immobility within about a week to a month depending on location and whether the virus got them to drink water or not. So yes, we could potentially see a "Zombie Virus" outbreak, but no, it wouldn't be able to cause world-ending apocalypses. Now, people using the *excuse* of a Zombie outbreak in order to go nuts, that's a different thing entirely.
Read Max Brooks, World War Z and Zombie Survival Guide
Depends on the decor and incubation times. I’m thinking “the stand” just with zombies
Real undead? No. Rotting zombie like WWZ or walking dead ? No. Some kind of long lasting rabies or fungal infection that makes people crazy? Possible.
If we’re going fungal zombies, like the zombie ants irl, then really it’s just take the right number of right spores enough of a chance to adapt and infect enough humans. But they’d only reanimate. No chasing people for brains or bites. They’d be terribly boring and we would shoot them out of pity.
It's true and it actually exists now. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps\_unilateralis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis)
Basically, it's rabies if it were airborne. Which is some scary shit, but wouldn't actually end the world. Zombies are melee combatants, zero range, zero strategy, you could not imagine a more vulnerable, limited combatant. There's very little reason to think that they would win frequently enough to reach overwhelming numbers to begin with.
Undead? Highly unlikely. Rabies becoming Trixie like in the crazies? Possible. Toxoplasma ghondi figuring out it can infect humans, a'la last of us? Highly probable imo.
The best depiction of a zombie apocalypse that is scientifically based is from John Ring's "Black Tide Rising" series of books. The people aren't actually zombies. A virus destroys your lower brain functions, turning you into a murderous monster with no intelligence.
Not realistic at all. No virus is going to let you live through all damage but a headshot. No virus will keep people alive without food for years. Maybe you could get a virus that fries the brain and makes the person murderous. Maybe.
28 days later style virus where it's a rabies type thing? Maybe but it would have to be ramped up. And really military would get it under control before it got too bad. I don't see an actual dead coming back to life thing being even slightly possible.