Atlanta’s no place to go if you’re trying to get away from the heat, mosquitoes, traffic and shopping malls.
Turns out it’s not the place to hide in a zombie attack, either.
It’s a proven fact, more or less.
A group of researchers at Cornell University, a respected institution of higher learning, developed a statistical model that simulates how the undead would spread across the country, were they to come after us.
Sure, it’s fictional. But still …
The authors of “You Can Run, You Can Hide: The Epidemiology and Statistical Mechanics of Zombies” show with dreadful certainty how swiftly we humans will be overcome by these hideous creatures, especially if we live in large metro areas. Like Atlanta.
An outbreak, they note, would be swift, spreading faster than a cold at the office and just as lethal. But because of their population density, major markets such as Atlanta would be more quickly devastated. Think weeks.
So, New York … dead. Los Angeles … dead.
No one would be especially safe. The best bet? Extreme rural places like nowhere Montana or noplace Nevada. It would take months for the zombies to get there without any direct flights.
Perhaps the only consolation for city dwellers is that the zombies would continue to migrate, and after the initial onslaught they would be most prevalent in smaller population centers not far from metros.
Whimsical as the study may appear, there is scientific purpose to it.
The authors note:
“Zombies captivate the imagination. The idea of a deadly disease that not only kills its hosts, but turns those hosts into deadly vectors for the disease is scary enough to fuel an entire genre of horror stories and films. But at its root, zombism is just that: a (fictional) disease, and so should be amenable to the same kind of analysis and study that more traditional diseases have long benefited from.
“Much scholarly attention has focused on more traditional human diseases, but recently, academic attention has turned some amount of focus towards zombies as a unique and interesting modification of classic disease models.”
Even the prestigious Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta has tapped into Zombism to make a point. In “Zombie Pandemic,” an illustrated story, the CDC uses a character’s imagined zombie attack to urge people to prepare for real life emergencies by keeping on hand an all-hazards emergency kit with items like water, batteries, medications and non-perishable food.
As the CDC notes in “Zombie Pandemic,” with an emergency kit, “You’ll be ready for any kind of disaster, even zombies.”
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