The best spots for riding out a zombie apocalypse are sparsely populated areas of Montana and Nevada, which remain untouched even four months, according to a new study by researchers at Cornell University who have developed a statistical model for simulating the spread of a fictional zombie epidemic. As The WSJ reports, with real-life applications to modeling viral outbreaks, Cornell offer dire warnings for those who live in Scranton, PA – with northeastern Pennsylvania as the U.S. location most at risk of being overrun by the undead.
Highly populated areas are a bad bet in general, of course. But Alexander Alemi, a graduate student and one of the authors of the paper, notes that the most susceptible spots change over time.
Seven days after the initial outbreak, lower Manhattan, with the map’s highest population density at 299,616 people, has the highest zombie susceptibility. In fact, the New York City metro area in general is probably best avoided, as are other large cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas.
By 28 days out, however, the pattern has shifted, Mr. Alemi says. Instead of individual cities being at the greatest risk, areas located between multiple major cities are most vulnerable. “You start to see interactions between different cities,” he says. While northeastern Pennsylvania, identified in the paper as the country’s most vulnerable region, “doesn’t have a particularly high population itself, it is near all these other high population areas.”
…
Also a bad bet—Bakersfield, Calif., which sits uncomfortably near San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
* * *
The spread starts slow and accelerates fast..
Blue – clear; Red – Zombies, Green – wiped out
Continue reading “ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE – NOW I REALLY HAVE TO MOVE”
