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Zombie Infection Apocalypse: Study Estimates It Would Take 100 Days To Wipe Humanity

By Angela Laguipo | Update Date: Jan 07, 2017 09:10 AM EST

In the event that a zombie infection apocalypse would take place, it would not take long until all of the humanity would be wiped out - just 100 days.

A team of students at the University Leicester in the United Kingdom investigated the possible spread of the zombie virus using a simple epidemiological model, the SIR model, which describes how an infectious disease would spread throughout an entire population.

The team worked on the assumption that each zombie would be able to find one victim per day, have a 90 percent chance of infecting that person and manage an "undead lifespan" of 20 days. This is twice as infectious as the "black death", Live Science reports.

The students calculated based on the estimated world population of 7.5 billion people today that it would take 20 days for a single zombie to start an epidemic. Then, a pandemic would have begun and the human population would decrease to 181 by day 100 of the epidemic, with 190 million zombies on the planet.

By 100 days, only about 100 survivors will be left uninfected. However, within six months, they would also die or become a zombie themselves. The researchers, however, noted that they did not account for other factors that can possibly influence the number of people who would survive. For instance, birth and death rates were not included. Moreover, they did not include the possibility that humans can kill zombies.

"Natural birth and death rates have been neglected since the epidemic takes place over 100 days, so the natural births and deaths are negligible compared to the impact of the zombie virus over the short time frame," the researchers wrote in the paper.

However, in a follow-up study, the students showed that as humans gradually kill more zombies, make more babies and get better at surviving, the world's population would bounce back after roughly 27 years, Science Alert reports.

"Interestingly we find that it is actually possible for our population to survive the zombie epidemic under these conditions," they added in the follow-up study.

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