New Delhi: According to a new study, a real-life zombie outbreak could wipe out the entire human population in merely one hundred days.
Assuming that a zombie can find one person each day, with a 90 per cent chance of infecting victims with the zombie infection, the students from University of Leicester in the UK suggest that by day one hundred there would be just 273 remaining human survivors, outnumbered a million to one by zombies.
The team, which presented the findings in the student-run Journal of Physics Special Topics, investigated the spread of a hypothetical zombie virus using the SIR model - an epidemiological model that describes the spread of a disease throughout a population.
The model splits the population into three categories - those susceptible to the infection, those that are infected and those that have either died or recovered.
The SIR model then considers the rates at which infections spread and die off as individuals in the population come into contact with each other.
As part of the formula, the students looked at S (the susceptible population), Z (the zombie population) and D (the dead population), suggesting that the average life-cycle of a zombie would be S to Z to D.
They also examined the time frame over which individuals in the population encounter one another.
The initial study did not factor in natural birth and death rates, since the hypothetical epidemic took place over 100 days, resulting in natural births and deaths being negligible compared to the impact of the zombie virus over a short time frame.
(With PTI inputs)
