Sometimes the number game just doesn’t add up. A conversation over at 4chan led BuzzFeed to hand over some helpful illustrations about the Walking Dead universe… and why that little “zombie problem” of theirs should really be over by now.
So, from what we know about population, there are 300 million people in the U.S. If even 99% of the population is infected, there are still three million regular old people around. And if they split off into groups like Rick’s (which many will have to do to survive), then they rack up a steady kill count.
…and by that count, the zombies should all be dead within a year or so.
What do you think? Even bringing neighboring countries into account, it still seems likely that they would have finished this up a while ago. You can check out BuzzFeed for the exact breakdown and more helpful image aids!
Given the rampant incompetence of Rick’s group, frankly I’m surprised anyone at all is left alive. Why bother securing a fence when you could just devolve into petty internal bickering and making out in guard towers?
We’ve seen in recent episodes that most survivors are *not* adept Walker-slayers like our hero group – I think we’re invited to believe that Rick, Darryl, Michonne & Co. were and remain an exemplary group who are breaking the curve on average kills per survivor group. Many survivor groups may also now have clustered into far less-populated areas, where they don’t *need* to kill off large groups.
I’m not so sure TWD time is the same as real time but I’ve always said that the ultimate goal of any zombie outbreak would have to be that everyone turns,they die or rot away and it’s over.Yes TWD has everyone infected and they rise when dead but that alone is easily controlable.Maybe the zombies have figured out how to make it through airport security and are flying in.
There’s also the question of decomposition. Zombies wandering around in the open would also be prey to big scavengers like possums and buzzards as well as insects and various bacteria.
It would very much surprise me if zombies lasted six months.
And, if they don’t eat brains, do they collapse and starve to death?
In addition to the animal, insect and bacterial clean-up crew. You also have the weather. Warm temps would speed decomp. And they’d freeze when it gets cold. You’d think after a year or so if the walkers were still active/’alive’ in whatever capacity zombies can claim they’d be pretty much immobile due to decay at that point.
How long can dead eyeballs last? The walkers should all have been blind long ago. And the delicate parts of the ear, the cochlea and so on, would have rotted away or jammed up with pus or useless. Same for scent. So the walkers would have no senses, even if they could still move around they’d just be stumbling randomly, not homing in on any noise or human scent. Walker biology is more absurd the more you think about it. Interestingly we saw some wild dogs chewing on a walker in the last episode. That seemed wrong, dogs don’t eat rotten meat. But there are plenty of other scavenger animals that do, hyena, vultures, etc. Birds should be swooping on walkers and pecking them to pieces. Pigs should have gone feral by now and be hunting walkers and chowing on them. Rick would have done better to have bred and releasesd boars around the prison, or kept them between the fences. Of course, he should have just went to the nearest construcion site and got some earth moving equipment and bulldozed some earthworks. And bulldozed the walkers if they built up numbers too fast.
I always like to point out that we have a zombie disease already; it makes you crazy & bite people, & those bites are infectious. It is called rabies & while it sure ain’t good, it ain’t that big a deal.
I really think most of the walkers should be decayed past the point of having skin by now. Except if there are still survivor camps getting overrun and producing new walkers everyday, or maybe the infection prevents them from decaying as fast as regular dead people would.
As for Rick and crew and everybody else racking up a good body count of zombies… I don’t think the count is that high… not as much as millions. There’s just a few people who seem to be good at killing walkers, Rick, Daryl, Michone, Beth…etc. and I imagine that it’s the same, or worse in the other camps (remember Woodbury?) Last episode showed a shocking lack of walker-killing skill even among adult residents in the prison (which I think is ridiculous and annoying at this stage.)
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Mordecai: “I always like to point out that we have a zombie disease already; it makes you crazy & bite people, & those bites are infectious. It is called rabies & while it sure ain’t good, it ain’t that big a deal.”
Yeah, but with diseases, the devil is in the details. Influenza was around for centuries before the Spanish Flu, and for about a century since. See also the thousand year history of bubonic plague, where subtle changes in the disease meant the difference between a minor background irritation and wiping out fifth of the world population.
Take rabies, drop some of the unrelated symptoms (to increase survival of the infected), tweak the infection rate and incubation period, and you’ve got a zombie apocalypse, for some meaning of the word zombie.
Aside from that, where IS everybody? It’s like the whole South is depopulated. There should either be millions and millions of zombies everywhere, or else they should have seen signs of the military re-taking the country by now.
What SeeingI said. But I have a problem that is more general: In most horror settngs, Guns Are Useless. In Zombie Apocalypse settings, Guns Are Life. The zombies in TWD are basically Romero zombies. Romero gave us a baseline for How Bad It Can Get in his movies. By that standard, Georgia, which is swimmng in guns compared to Pennsylvania, should be zombie free pretty quick.
All zombies should be dead because their corpses should be completely rotten by now. There should be nothing else than bones.
I’m sorry, but these comments make me laugh. Have any of you actually read the comics or the letter columns at the end of each issue? This whole “decomposition” thing has already been adressed numerous times. Yes, a normal human corpse would decompose, but remember THIS IS A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE. The normal rules don’t apply in this. Kirkman has answered all these theories and questions. Do yourself a favour, go read the actual comic.
I don’t think so. I mean, 99% is just a random number. The survival rate could be 50% or 0.0001% – we don’t rightly know. I think there are pockets of survivors everywhere (which we see in the show a lot, actually) but they aren’t all necessarily killing a few zombies a week. You only kill when you need to, you know, becaus every encounter is a risk.
What I don’t get is how there are still so many zombies period. They wouldn’t be very effective hunters and there certainly aren’t enough humans to sustain hundreds of millions of them. They all appear to be starving to death which I realize takes longer for a zombie but… years? Months maybe, but not years, surely, since they are wandering around most of the time anyway.
I think I agree with the potential for the annihilation of the turned with those circumstances. The countdown of zombie population only works if the variables within the story line up with the mathematician’s expectations. We have seen on the show, The Walking Dead, that many refuse to kill the walkers but hide away or let others do the killing. There are stretches of time that any given group stays behind fences, walls, etc between supply runs or whatever else when they don’t do any walker slaying. Some insane people kept a supply of these beasts for security or intimidation. Also consider the factor of the newly dead at any given point. Not all had a piercing of the skull upon death. Many undead also were locked away for the safety of the once-living beings like what Rick discovered at the hospital upon waking. If the creators of the show are anticipating another hundred episodes, like they said on The Talking Dead, expectations should prove more true. You would think by then the walker numbers would be tough to keep up with the dwindled society. After all, the original outbreak of zombies are disintegrating and by now it is common knowledge to aim for the head.
But the disease that makes walkers is in everyone, so every time someone dies it makes another walker. Therefore, the problem of walkers will never just go away. Remember the prison when they had like the really bad flu? They had people dying really quickly overnight and turn into walkers effectively creating more walkers. So there will always be walkers.