Zombies would wipe out humans in less than 100 days

The paper, published in the University of Leicester’s Journal of Physics Special Topics, was a fanciful use of the so-called SIR model, which is used in epidemiology to simulate how diseases spread over time. It’s not the first time zombies have been used as a public health metaphor. In December 2015, for example, the British medical journal The Lancet published a tongue-in-cheek paper titled “Zombie infections: epidemiology, treatment, and prevention.” And the website of the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) once went viral with a blog post urging zombie apocalypse preparations as a metaphor for real-life disaster preparedness.

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In the new analysis, the University of Leicester undergraduates assumed that each zombie would have 90 percent success at finding and infecting one human a day, a rate that would make the zombie virus twice as contagious as the Black Death, the plague that devastated Europe in the 1300s.

The researchers further estimated that each zombie could live 20 days without braaaaaains.

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