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Zombies might be a threat for the first days or weeks. People aren't used to killing, especially not things that look human, especially things that might look like a friend or family member. People would hesitate, or screw up, or think they were safe, or whatever.
But, after a short time people would either learn to fight zombies, or they'd become zombies.
Good zombie fiction isn't really about the zombies, it's about the breakdown of society. Bad zombie fiction has people still fighting zombies multiple years after the outbreak started.
The thing I wish you'd see sometimes in zombie fiction is no zombies. Like, a few months after the outbreak, a group of humans completely eliminates 100% of the zombies from a big island or peninsula so people within that area can live normally. It might require killing a million zombies, but that's only 1000 zombies each by 1000 people. That's only about 30 zombies a day for a month per person, which should be pretty easy for a dedicated, competent zombie killer. Instead, the most you get is a small walled town with countless zombies on the walls.
It just makes no sense that you typically see every survivor killing dozens of zombies per hour every day and they don't seem to be making a dent in the local zombie population.
To be fair, we still have a covid pandemic going on because people are not smart enough to do the smart thins. They will hide their ingections, the infection screenings will be done by incpmpetent people, the rich and dumb elite will preserve zombies as "exotic pets" they show off to their friend because "they have money, so rules don't apply to them", and sentimental idiots won't let go of their turned loved ones. Not to mention the otherwise entitled people who just blatantly disregard every precaution because "You can't limit my freedom with this hoax".
But yeah, in ideal world, the zombie outbreak would be dealt swiftly.
Yeah, but that's because COVID isn't 100% fatal, whereas zombie bites are 100% fatal.
It doesn't necessarily mean that people would be more cautious of a Zombie outbreak, it just means that the dumb ones would be awarded Darwins much more swiftly, leaving only the more cautious ones behind.
The incubation time is key. Imagine, we are already carrying the virus, babies are infected in the womb or through a funghi. Some show symptoms immediately, some later, some never.
Add to that a possibility of asymptomous infection. Not only that, but assuming this would be a parasitic or viral infection, them killing the host, especially before spreading, would not be beneficial for survival, so the infection would probably become nonleathal to majority, because the surviving strands would be the ones that stay hidden the longest.
In addition, if "the efficient erradication" missed a one zombie, what guaranties are there that it was JUST one zombie? Could you trust someone who has been in contact witha a zombie, but claims not being infected? Have you been in contact with a zombie recently, mayhaps? Are you sure you haven't been?
The most realistic zombie outbreak is one that gives people the uncontrollable urge to infect others when given the opportunity and prevents them from revealing their infection if possible, but otherwise leaves them mostly functional. It would also be way more effective than hordes of decaying, shambling corpses because the "zombies" would still look and act human most of the time.
asymptomous infection.
I think I might have gotten it at one point. Every single time I had a sniffle I got tested and never once showed positive. Coworkers, members of my household, friends, my wife. Everyone around me got it at least once but apparently not me. So, I am either very lucky (bad bet) or somehow I got it with no symptoms.
True, but in the Zombie fiction I've come across the incubation time is extremely short. That makes it more dramatic and scary in one sense, but would make the outbreak much easier to control. In particular, if you can spread it without knowing you're infected, the world is in real trouble.
That's another thing that makes typical Zombies so easy to control. The only "people" who can spread it are dead. You can safely care for someone until the moment they die. As long as you can avoid getting bitten once they're dead, you're safe. Real diseases are so much more dangerous because doctors and nurses have to weigh the risk of getting infected against the desire to help the patient.
I'd love to see a Zombie story involving a bored nurse who follows standard safety procedures and straps a standard Hannibal Lecter style mask on any possibly terminally ill patient.
Those people just become more zombies and get killed by the competent people.
Good zombie fiction isn't really about the zombies, it's about the breakdown of society. Bad zombie fiction has people still fighting zombies multiple years after the outbreak started.
A good zombie series can have both. The Last of Us was really about people in the post apocalypse, not about zombies, but they were still fighting zombies 20 years later.
Which, IMO, is ridiculous. 20 years is too long for zombies to still be an issue.
Think about a typical Zombie story. The survivors are often killing multiple zombies per hour. Sometimes it's quiet and there are none, but sometimes it's frantic and it's tens of zombies per hour. Say it averages out to 1 zombie per hour, but only when you're out scavenging, so 10 per day. That's about 300 zombies per month, about 3500 per year, and that's without any real effort to hunt them down and eradicate them.
That's 35,000 per person over 10 years, 70,000 per person over 20 years -- and again, that's just casually encountering and killing 10 zombies per day, without making any real effort to eradicate them. At that rate, (casually killing any zombies they happen to encounter) it would take only about 23 people to clear the entire population of Manhattan (1.6 million) over 20 years. The population of Greater Tokyo is 37 million. At 10 zombies per day it would only take slightly more than 500 people to clear every zombie from the megacity over 20 years.
Now, just imagine you had a zombie-proof wall and someone whose job it was to go stab every zombie up against the wall. They could probably do 1-2 a minute, say 100 per hour, 1000 per day. Over 20 years that one person could personally handle 7 million zombies. Clearly, you'd also need to clear out and remove the bodies, but just in terms of culling the zombie population, it would be easy to do.
Even if zombies killed 99.9% of the population, they should be uncommon after a few months, and incredibly rare after a decade.
That's pretty much the situation in The Last of Us. Humanity has retreated behind walls. Zombies are mostly not a threat, but they exist outside of the encampments. You can live a life without fighting zombies, but if you need to travel for any reason, you're taking a risk. The biggest risk is from the tribes of people you'll encounter along the way though.
I like your detailed response but you do need to consider reckless people, mistakes and oversight. Encountering a horde with just 2 can become problematic.
Consistently killing 10 zombies every day for 20 years, my guess is you'd slip up sooner or later. So not killing them and trying to stay safe instead could be a better option.
They would still rot away before the 20 years are over though
Once they have a safe place, most people will kill zero a day. And the guy killing them on the walls would require them to come to the walls. Natural barriers should prevent that.
Which would mean that zombies are extremely rare after a few months, which isn't what we keep seeing in zombie fiction.
It depends on how the zombies are made - if it's one of those "everyone who dies always comes back as a zombie" deals, the fighting will never end until the last living person is gone.
Death Stranding had something like this, except people became nukes instead of zombies when they died. Assuming it isn't an instant switch from death to walking corpse it would probably be handled the same way with corpse disposal teams transporting bodies to an incinerator ASAP.
I've never seen / heard / read any zombie fiction where they were completely unkillable. The standard zombie fiction has them gone for good if you kill the brain. Sure, everybody who dies comes back as a zombie, but that just means you kill the first wave over a few years, and then make sure that any time anybody dies their brains are perforated and then they're cremated.
There's decent evidence for how humans would handle that situation. Ebola used to be a real problem in Sudan / Congo. Part of the problem was that typical funeral rites involved washing the dead bodies by hand. That spread the disease and more people died. Once people realized that they couldn't do that without spreading the disease, they adapted. At a certain point the survivors would just have standard death practices that ensured that nobody who died came back as a zombie.
There are some fictional villains that are unkillable. Some that can even eventually self-assemble if you do something like cremate or atomize them. But, they're individual villains. I've never heard of anything like that for hordes of zombies.
Besides, even if zombies were completely unkillable, they're dumb. Herd them into a mine and then seal it. There are mines that are currently (or were recently) used to store Helium. If they're so enclosed that not even the second smallest element can escape, they're going to keep Zombies enclosed too.
I don't believe that if everyone who died came back as a zombie (and no, zombies don't come back - once you kill them they're gone) that the entire world would be coordinated enough to keep them from ever becoming a threat - certain countries might be diligent enough to make sure most corpses had the head destroyed immediately, but countries with less resources would become overrun, just like disease hits them harder now. But you're right, they could probably be kept in check by some countries indefinitely.
I think countries with fewer resources would be better off. They're not as interconnected and dependent as the richer countries. Plus, people there are more used to hardship and probably more likely to have encountered death, even if it's just an animal.
People in those countries are used to having to get their water from a well instead of just turning on a tap. They're used to electricity being unreliable or going out. They're used to not getting around by car. They don't rely on supermarkets with their just-in-time supply chains delivering goods coming from other countries to get fed.
If there was a mild zombie outbreak, a more developed country might handle it better because they could mobilize armed forces with body armor, guns and lots of bullets. They'd have great communication infrastructure to coordinate their response, and so on.
But, if it was a devastating attack where half the population or more was dead, it would be so much worse. People in the developed world rely on modern conveniences and have never had to do without: tap water, well stocked grocery stores, reliable Internet access, reliable electricity, gas stations always having gas, etc. If the power plants started failing because too many who knew how to operate them had been zombified, that would have knock-on effects to everything else. We saw just how disruptive COVID was to supply chains, and that was a plan that a committee thought out and implemented, trying to think about all those difficulties.
Night of the Living Dead 2, they were effectively unkillable. They even nuke them at the end and all of does is spread it faster.