Image credit: AMC

Sorry, fellow zombie apocalypse survivalists, but the math doesn’t math out.

Summary:

The Walking Dead ’s classic apocalypse scenario looks very questionable if you make some basic calculations.
Even if 99% of people were turned into zombies immediately, they would have had a few months to run, at best.
The fallout of such a short-lived zombie apocalypse would have been far more dramatic than the outbreak itself.

Pretty much every zombie apocalypse follows the same pattern: the virus breaks out of contamination and infects everyone, and when people start dying, massive hordes of zombies wipe out the military, the government, and all the civilians. The most random people who happen to survive the initial outbreak become survivors in a world that’s completely taken over by the undead.

The Walking Dead, in particular, follows this exact scenario, and this show made it more popular than ever. But if we look a bit closer, its math doesn’t work out.

The Walking Dead Could Never Happen

Since the show takes place in the United States, let’s make our calculations based on that. In 2024, there are just over 340 million people living in the US. Even in the impossible scenario where the zombie virus turns 99% of them into zombies instantly, that implies there are 336M undead and 4M survivors. Noted.

Now, let’s say that on average, each person dispatches 5 walkers per month; 40M people killing 5 zombies per month each, equals… 2,400,000,000 zombies dispatched per year. The survivors would have killed all the walkers in the US 7 times over in that time; in other words, every last zombie would have been exterminated in less than two months. Two months to save the United States.

In The Walking Dead, even two years later, the survivors had to fight off infinite zombie hordes. That’s… A little bit on the impossible side, don’t you think?

How Could The Walking Dead Work?

Of course, we only gave your rough estimations. Among the survivors, there would be quite a few people who can’t fight and die after the initial breakout; there would be children, old people, and disabled folks who’d have a much harder time. But the core of every group, the fighters, would kill far more than 5 zombies per month, so it’s fair.

Even with the bizarre assumption that 99% of people get turned into mindless monsters immediately, the zombie apocalypse had no chance of lasting longer than two months; a year maximum, if everyone felt too cute to go around killing the walkers. In the real world, the apocalypse itself would have been rather short-lived — but its consequences would have been tremendous, leading to a brutal society.

In which the few surviving people would have proven to be worse enemies to each other than the zombies; but that’s the part The Walking Dead nailed brilliantly.