It has been a while since I posted to this blog (Sorry! Been busy writing!), but today happened to have me coming across a reddit post that got me considering viral, zombie outbreaks in cities, and how they’d affect the world. This is more of a thought experiment than a concrete set of events, though I do feel that the general trajectory of civilization would fall along each of these paths. So, here are my 2 cents for the different ways that the world might end:
The infection time is about ten to fifty seconds. People become zombies extremely fast after being bitten. Symptoms range from violent convulsions and spasms to a spontaneous, yet subtle “switch” into zombie behavior. Obviously, the outbreak would spread very fast, but just how fast is the question.
Scenario One
Everyone connected to this city’s landmass is immediately fucked because the rate of infection is exponential and is only limited by when Person A bites person B. Let’s be generous. The initial outbreak doesn’t happen via super-spreader event. There are no heroes who see someone get attacked and run over to help. Most people see an aggressive person with clear mental issues and just run away. We’ll assume that, on average, your zombies are able to claim a fresh victim only once every five minutes. That is still over 4,000 people within the hour. Already, roughly 1 in 1000 of the people in your city are running around the streets like roided out killers.
The cops will get called immediately, but they’re not going to intuitively know that they got stuck dealing with Train to Busan, and will either get killed themselves or run away without answers. It could be hours before someone in authority gets hold of a body, or is able to call in the military. But the rate of growth is still exponential. Within 4-5 hours, anyone who hasn’t wizened up and hunkered down is dead. We’ll say that 2 out of 3 people aren’t idiots, and successfully locked the doors as soon as the zombies came. We still have 500,000 infected vectors looking to do anyone a murder. Just in the first 4-5 hours alone.
So perhaps we quarantine the city? Get a bunch of troops in the area and block off all the exits? Mobilizing that many bodies could take upwards of 12 hours on even the best of conditions. Meanwhile, the average person runs at 6.5 – 8mph. We’ll be generous and pick the lower end of 6 for zombie speed. Within the stretch of time after those first 5 hours (because we’re polite and say that none ran out of the city in that time), they’ll still have been able to cover over 40 miles of territory. Most are inevitably going in circles, but we can say that at least one of them has picked a random direction and happened to not encounter anything. He’ll have broken quarantine and will keep moving until he hits another town, city, or municipality, where the process will repeat.
Zombies don’t need to take breaks or sleep. If left to their own devices, one could cover 144 miles in a single day at this speed. The wider the quarantine area, the longer it takes to mobilize forces, so it is impossible to cover all land that this zombie could take. That speed is enough to cover the entirety of Australia in 17 days, Continental US in 20 days, or Eurasia in 40, where any time a zombie finds a fresh city, the initial outbreak conditions get repeated, albeit to lessened effect as society adapts. But again, it is worth repeating that this is still happening under the most generous terms imaginable.
So every civilization connected to the first city is doomed within a few weeks / months, and the only way around this is if the military is able to quarantine cities that haven’t been infected to keep more zombies from forming. But that requires both the consent from the population as well as a steady supply chain to feed / maintain them all… Through territory that is unsafe. We also still have those 1 million people in the first city that never got resolved. The longer they’re trapped, the more inclined they’ll be to run, and probably die without military support (let’s not kid ourselves and think that landing a head shot on a running target is some simple task). Moral of the story, zombie numbers will keep growing at a pace that the world can’t deal with until small self-sustaining anti-zombie communities are formed.
The good news is that oceans change the game for some nations. Swimming requires a level of physical coordination that zombies are canonically bad at doing, so any attempt to cover large bodies of water will still leave them governed by currents more than their own speed. Any nation that has a robust national guard / coast patrol might be able to establish safeguards within a month of the first outbreak, along with whatever dystopian government is needed to keep their population (no doubt swollen by refugees) under control. Things obviously keep going from here, but it’s less interesting since we’ve past outbreak time.
The infection time is about five to thirty minutes. People become zombies a bit slower, although still fast enough to cause significant damage within hours. Symptoms are almost immediate disorientation, difficulty breathing, and loss of consciousness right before turning.
Scenario 2
This is probably the worst case scenario (fun side-note, but The Hollowing followed a pattern between this and Scenario 3, albeit with additional factors). The time delay actually makes things worse than Scenario 1 because an infected-but-nonthreatening person can travel faster than a zombie, and it is also harder to see that they’ll become a zombie early because you aren’t literally watching a person get attacked, and then attack everyone else in less than a minute.
So it is this time where I’ll be less generous and point out that some people are heroes and will try to help, some people are idiots who’ll stand around and watch with their phones, and one person is inevitably going to zombify in a crowded subway as they try to leg it to the hospital. Instead of having one wave of World War Z style zombies running from block to block, the first couple hours will be pocketed by a series of micro-outbreaks in many different locations that each are likely to lead to 5-10 people getting infected before the crowds have dispersed and everyone’s gone to safety… Only for some of those people to drop within half an hour and repeat the same process. Maybe in their homes if we’re lucky. Maybe on the street. Surely, one will pop into a hospital before the end.
Therefore, while the first hours will be less high paced and action packed than the Scenario 1 outbreak, the rate of infection is still exponential, so even if those 4-5 hours have gone by and only 1,000 people have turned, we’ve established that each micro-outbreak leads to anywhere from 5-10 new people getting infected, on average once every 20 minutes. The city itself could still have those 500,000 infected in less than a day if no one steps in.
But the real rub here is that this is harder to contain than scenario 1 because 5-30 minutes is enough time for an infected-but-able-bodied person to get in a car and drive anywhere, most likely looking for help because some psycho just bit them and no one knows why. Some of these people will stay trapped in their cars. Some will get out in a last-stitch effort to find help. You’ve already cleared the city and made it into the burbs in that time, and now you’re a zombie running around grandma’s neighborhood looking for a snack. There is absolutely no way for the government to mobilize against this quickly enough.
In the end, you’re then left with a situation that is similar to 1, with the added caveat that people will have a more difficult time quarantining themselves early because some infected will initially appear as only sick, and not zombies in wait. The good news is that it’ll be apparent after that first day or so who is infected by the scenario’s own logic, and some degree of individual agency might inform these people that it’s better to either off themselves or self-quarantine to keep others safe. The bad news is that even if you manage to cut down the cap of infected individuals by a factor of 10, your city still has 50,000 zombies running around by the end of the day. Each of these 50,000 need to be individually murdered and bodies properly disposed of… It isn’t going to happen.
I’ll dive a little deeper into what happens to the survivors of day 1 here. Everyone who is trapped will need food, water, medicine, etc. Being that they’re in a city, they’re likely trapped in an office building or something similar that won’t have some massive supplies at the ready. So it only takes a couple of days before these people are forced to migrate, where most of them will become infected. We still have 50,000 zombies running around and the government will be scrambling to protect other communities than to rid the city of infestation. In other words, once the zombies have taken the streets, their numbers can only keep growing from there.
So it’s at this point where we bring up the fact that zombie numbers will keep increasing in number and it is impossible to contain them. The rules and mechanics for how this spreads to the rest of the world will be similar as Scenario 1, although now you’ve introduced the possibility of some working their way onto planes, boats, or trains while refugees attempt to migrate to safer territory. Many of these stowaways will be outed and destroyed, but it seems hard to believe that none will find their way to landfall before getting caught. Thus, all nations now have a risk of outbreaks occurring virtually anywhere, and governments would have to come up with their own containment protocols and border security to mitigate the risk. It is possible that you might have those same dystopian militarized nations surviving, but I’m a little more skeptical here. You can’t cross the world in 5-30 minutes, but you can sure as hell put yourself in a place where you’ll be a timebomb waiting to be discovered.
The good news for humanity though is that individual communities would be easier to form. The speed of infection is fast enough where you can quarantine a person for an hour and know that they’re Okay, and it’s still slow enough that if someone gets infected, you have plenty of time to act. In the end, while the world is still going to collapse within a couple weeks / months, it isn’t quite the same genocide maker as Scenario 1. Outbreaks are easier to contain once everyone is on the same page, so it’s all a matter of throwing up walls and coming up with your own rules.
Of course, that is post-outbreak where things have broken the scope of the conversation.
The infection time ranges from a few hours to a full day. Expectedly, the growth of the outbreak wouldn’t be measured in hours, but days or even weeks. Symptoms would start as flu-like, but would worsen into Ebola-esque symptoms, and the usual loss of consciousness before turning.
Scenario 3
It is at this speed where things become more manageable in the short term, but just as dangerous long-term, and you kinda have to figure out how Patient Zero was formed. Did they work in disease research? Are they a terrorist who’s bioweapon went off early? Did they just happen to eat an uncooked bat at a flea market? Each of these situations would affect how well a government would be able to respond to the outbreak.
We can start though by assuming that the first person has their own micro-outbreak, similar to Scenario 2, that has them infecting 5-10 people before someone has either killed or contained them. Most (if not all) of these people will have ample time to go to the hospital and have their injuries treated. A medical examination will occur on Patient Zero, and the anomalous nature of their condition will prompt a response from the CDC, or similar entity.
Since we’re left with a wide range of “a few hours to a day,” it is hard to know precisely how quickly next generations of micro-outbreaks will form, but they’ll all likely be occurring in the same hospital or general location in the city. Each of these events will spawn those same 5-10 infections as the next generation has occurred, presumably within 12 hours.
You now have a dozen or so active cases of zombification, and about 30-90 other cases of people who’ll become zombies. This is where the government has a decent window to fully contain things. Due to the unique nature of zombies, and the fact that virtually everyone who made contact with Patient Zero died, this would get kicked straight up to the top of command. Virologists would be consulted, martial law considered, and contact tracing emphasized. There’s a good chance that most governments would have their shit together within the 24 hours after the second generation of zombies has developed.
However, those 30-90 cases have since become active, each with their own outbreaks, and some of them quicker than others. We’ll lowball things here because most of those 30-90 zombies will have gone to the hospital of their own accord, with disease specialists looking to quarantine them properly. A handful will have worked their way onto the streets. In the end, you’re still likely to end up with several hundred more infected cases as these micro-outbreaks hit 3rd and 4th generation status. For the purpose of discussion, 5-25 active, unquarantined zombies, and anywhere from 100-150 fledgling cases.
This is where the nature of geopolitics matters most. Is this government well-equipped to handle this outbreak? Are the citizens obedient to their government? How efficiently can they contact trace? The answers to these questions will determine life or death for humanity.
A competent, well-equipped government would immediately force a regional quarantine, just as China did in Wuhan. They would then mobilize the full weight of the military to contain this threat, with their citizens forced under lockdown. Mass arrests would occur for anyone who could be infected as contact tracing identifies every possible vector. Mobile command operations would be established, and quarantine cells would spring up to contain anyone sick. People would inherently try to hide from the government’s draconian response, but we live in an era where information dominates and privacy is a thing of the past. To track down 100-150 cases before they go active is well within the power of a nation’s military, followed by an elongated several week lockdown to make sure no more cases spring up. There would be all sorts of damage to the economy and social fabric of this nation, but humanity would prevail.
But what if they aren’t prepared? What if some bureaucratic or logistic problems slow down the process? You still wouldn’t have some explosion in cases, but you would continue to see these small micro-outbreaks springing up around the country over the course of a week while everyone is told to stay indoors.
We all remember COVID. The longer you’re forced inside, the more difficult it is to keep people there. Sooner or later, citizens will go to the streets of their own accord, convinced that the lockdown was based on government lies.
And that is where the true danger lies. Each of these protests are occurring while there are still active zombie cases unaccounted for, meaning that any single one of them could become a super-spreader event. Suddenly, it isn’t one person attacking 5 people on a bus. It’s dozens, if not hundreds of people all getting attacked in a congested crowd while there’s a brawl with the cops. Contact tracing becomes more difficult, and everyone there has an incentive to run and hide.
Each of those infected will go on to infect others in less than a day, all while there’s still no clear consensus as to why it is happening. (Another selfish plug, but one of my currently unreleased companion novellas to The Hollowing features this part of the outbreak)
This is where the timescale of the containment is working against the government. The longer it drags on, the harder it is to slow down, and the more people will lose faith in the powers that be. At a certain point, whether they admit the size and scope of the outbreak, there will be too many of them floating around, and too much time has passed to just sit in your room and eat chips until it all blows over. Whole swaths of people will attempt to migrate to safer areas, breaking the government’s response, which in turn will allow more infections to flourish, exponentially so now that the opportunity to “flatten the curve” has failed.
In the end, you’re left with the same slow, but steady collapse of civilization. Except instead of this happening in a couple months, it could be well over a year as each nation has to individually attempt their own quarantines, lockdowns, etc, while a roiled economy has destroyed supply chains and manufactured hunger / labor crises, which in turn is killing more people than the zombies. Outbreaks still occur with increasing veracity, but for the most part, mass migration and starvation are what’s dismantled the world’s globalized order.
How survivors adapt has all sorts of interesting implications, but this is no longer the “outbreak phase,” and therefore not relevant here.
The infection time is several days. This would probably be on the more realistic side of an infection’s progression. Again, flu-like symptoms, followed by Ebola-like symptoms, the loss of consciousness and turning. Since the infection time is so slow this time around, we can give the virus some assistance by saying that in the infection is spread through fluid contact before turning, including fluid droplets in sneezes.
Scenario 4
Probably the least likely to kill humanity. Even if you’re generous to the zombies, the rate of infection is on such a slow timescale that society has plenty of time to react before it is out of control.
However, because you’ve made it partially airborne, each outbreak that does occur is happening on a larger scale. For the benefit of conversation, we’ll say that Patient Zero has managed to infect 20-30 people before being stopped, who in turn will infect 20-30 people each. Following the math of the above, this means that after a couple of days since Patient Zero turned, there are 20-30 active zombie cases in generation two, and an additional 500-700 developing cases that will become generation three.
Once again, this gets kicked straight to the top of the food chain as the government has to identify and contain all of these people, a task made more Herculean than before due to the spread of fluids, and not just bites/scratches. However, instead of having only a couple hours before they infect more people, the government has several days. So while each of those cases in turn create more cases, an early lockdown response can greatly cut down on the rate of growth for infected subjects.
Of course, it is unlikely that they’ll be able to contain every single infection, but the slow rate in which it develops gives them plenty of time to identify and contain as many as possible. The longer things drag on, the more time they have to adapt to balancing the needs of society and the speed to which outbreaks are contained. You can see a situation develop pretty quickly where outbreaks go from infecting 20-30 people per zombie to only 3-5 at a time as society is forced into isolation. Instead of needing a full extermination, you’re able to reliably “flatten the curve”.
As the crisis drags on, there will be tremendous pressure on the government to ease up restrictions without slowing down arrests, in the same way that some nations balanced COVID with their economy. Instead of mass riots that lead to super-spreader events, people would learn that if they see someone with flu/ebola like symptoms, they simply run away and call the cops. Business can otherwise go about normally.
The outbreak will vary across the globe. Some nations that are as divided as the US may see a political bent against the government, manufacturing outbreaks and hindering efforts where they don’t need to be. Others might just shut everything down like South Korea and see little-to-no cases. It will definitely become a global phenomenon though because every single infection takes several days to be fully realized, which is more than enough time to cross borders.
But I just don’t see this as a civilization killer. There would be deaths, suffering, mass unrest, and economic damage to no end, but having several days to identify, contain, and quarantine every single outbreak gives humanity plenty of time to adjust. At the end of the day, there being zombies that sometimes attack people would just be “the new normal”, with survivors being hesitant to travel near unsafe zones, and nations’ strengths premised by the speed to which they can quarantine new cases. You can imagine a world where life isn’t much changed a couple years after the first case occurs.
But that has hit post-outbreak time, where we stop caring.
Anyway, I hope everyone had fun indulging these doomsday scenarios with me. Until next time! <3
