Is it just fiction or fact? Science explains how to survive in case a real zombie apocalypse befalls humanity. Statisticians from Cornell focusing on a fictional zombie outbreak as an approach to disease modeling suggests heading for the hills, along the Rockies, is the way to survive an impending zombie apocalypse.
According to them, cities will be the first to get infected but it can take many weeks for the virus to reach rural areas. As a matter of fact, people in the northern mountain-tine zone would have months to prepare before zombies might reach them.
Why the cities? Basically, it is more populated there. In the movies, the virus can affect many people at the same time. According to Alex Alemi, a graduate student at Cornell University, "If there is a zombie outbreak, it is usually assumed to affect all areas at the same time, and some months after the outbreak you're left with small pockets of survivors. But in our attempt to model zombies somewhat realistically, it doesn't seem like this is how it would actually go down."
They will present their study at the 2015 American Physical Society March Meeting on Thursday, March 5 in San Antonio, Texas, as reported by Science Daily. However, inspired by the growing fondness of Americans with zombies, they used this model because it will take them to many techniques in determining epidemiological markers of real diseases.
"It's interesting in its own right as a model, as a cousin of traditional SIR [susceptible, infected, and resistant] models--which are used for many diseases--but with an additional nonlinearity," explains Alemi.
"Each possible interaction--zombie bites human, human kills zombie, zombie moves, etc.--is treated like a radioactive decay, with a half-life that depends on some parameters, and we tried to simulate the times it would take for all of these different interactions to fire, where complications arise because when one thing happens it can affect the rates at which all of the other things happen," he added.
He added that when taking into consideration the dynamics of the disease, when zombies invade populated areas and there are no more humans to bite, the whole outbreak slows down. Alemi recommends that 'if ever' a real zombie apocalypse do materializes, it is better to run to the mountains or the northern Rockies.