Assuming that a zombie can find one person each day, and has a 90 percent success rate in infecting victims with the virus, the researchers found that humans would be facing extinction after just 100 days.
On day 100 there would be just 273 human survivors, outnumbered a million to one by zombies.
However, the researchers cautioned that the 90 percent zombification rate of their model, a rate of contagion higher than the black death, could change over the course of the epidemic, giving humans more time.
“As the zombie to human ratio increases, this becomes less realistic,” they wrote in their paper, called “A Zombie Epidemic” and published in the journal Physics Special Topics.
“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.”
Their model takes into account zombies' ability to cross geographical barriers, the different rates of infection in more or less densely populated areas, and gives zombies a lifetime of 20 days before they die from starvation or thirst.
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