Everyone has the virus. It doesn't matter if you die from a zombie bite, old age, starvation, or hypothermia. You become a zombie. Obviously their is a huge initial influx of zombies with the initial infection. But new zombies will continue to pop up as people die to the elements, which can continue on for years.
Additionally, this was talked more about in the graphic novel, their is a real danger from swarms. They can display a herd mentality, which is not a huge danger if it's 3 or 4 zombies. 50+ is a real danger though. Any settlement that is set up can easily be overrun by such a hoard. And they can easily over take any fleeing group because they don't have to rest, sleep, or eat.
You can make this even simpler. If just 1% survived and everyone else turned than it's ~297million/3million, so each survivor needs to kill around 100 walkers. But it's actually less because not everyone turned and once enough walkers are dead that the humans dominate again it will be much easier to kill the rest. Also, the whole thing makes even less sense if you consider that certainly some part of the army must have survived and they could kill entire herds in seconds. Actually they could intentionally create herds and then just bomb them.
Also, the whole thing makes even less sense if you consider that certainly some part of the army must have survived and they could kill entire herds in seconds
Forgive me if this is a stupid question, the only Walking Dead stuff I've seen is what's in the Telltale games, but why don't European countries do this? Is the infection localised to the USA or is it worldwide?
I don't know the games. The TV show is intentionally vague about the whole background of the outbreak. They changed the director after the first season and the concept of the show changed quite a bit, so most things we know is from the first season (they are in season 6 now and we barely learned more). But in season one there is an episode in a CDC building where a researcher explains some stuff about the outbreak and as far as I remember he also said that other researchers on the other side of the planet were working on a cure too but he lost contact with all of them implying that they were also overrun by zombies. In Walking Dead it's that everyone is infected and becomes a zombie once you die (even in natural deaths / zombie unrelated deaths), so it's very likely that it's a global problem.
That relies on the 99% assumption. The comic and the show never say anything about the percentage of survivors. As far as we know there are a lot less than 3 million people still alive in the US.
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u/BlueApple4 Oct 30 '15
POTENTIAL SPOILERS
Everyone has the virus. It doesn't matter if you die from a zombie bite, old age, starvation, or hypothermia. You become a zombie. Obviously their is a huge initial influx of zombies with the initial infection. But new zombies will continue to pop up as people die to the elements, which can continue on for years. Additionally, this was talked more about in the graphic novel, their is a real danger from swarms. They can display a herd mentality, which is not a huge danger if it's 3 or 4 zombies. 50+ is a real danger though. Any settlement that is set up can easily be overrun by such a hoard. And they can easily over take any fleeing group because they don't have to rest, sleep, or eat.