Canadian scientists are hard at work solving the uncertainties of life – University of Ottawa and Carleton University statisticians just released the thesis When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection to peer review in the scientific journal Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress.
Their findings advocate for an wide-scale approach to containment :
“An outbreak of zombies infecting humans is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead. While aggressive quarantine may eradicate the infection, this is unlikely to happen in practice. A cure would only result in some humans surviving the outbreak, although they will still coexist with zombies. Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time.
“It is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.
Not that we didn’t know that before (no matter what S.T.A.R.S. funding plugs made you believe), but they back it up with hard science – they have a formula
(where S=susceptibles, Z=zombies and R=removed), according to which a city of 500,000 will be completely infected in less than 3 days. You may also compare it to this mathematical model for vampirism.
Maybe now would be a good time to get one of those tactical crossbows
[more sexy zombie photos] [Wired] [Neatorama] [io9]
