7 ms·

You know, I always thought that a zombie apocalypse was impossible because it'd be nipped in the bud by armed forces, but after seeing the COVID19 reaction all

You know, I always thought that a zombie apocalypse was impossible because it'd be nipped in the bud by armed forces, but after seeing the COVID19 reaction all over the world, I'm not so sure anymore. Just saying...

gpm 6y ago
Covid's death rate is less than 1%, if we saw a "zombie apocalypse" disease (death rate 100%... plus zombies) we'd see a very different reaction for a very good reason.
- hprotagonist 6y ago
  yes, we’d all be zombies.
  - goatlover 6y ago
    100% death rates don't make for good pandemics and rabies-style viruses are poor spreaders, since you have to bite a victim.
    - gpm 6y ago
      The 4 billion American chestnut trees would like to disagree with your first assertion. Or at least they would like to if they weren't trees and weren't dead.
      - selimthegrim 6y ago
        That one Aqua Teen episode is probably a preview of their reaction.
    - hprotagonist 6y ago
      well, a zombie pandemic is a 100% undeath rate... 0% dead but 100% contagious forever after is a practically unbounded r_0.
      - goatlover 6y ago
        If they are typical zombies who have to spread the contagion via bites and scratches, and are slow and stupid, then my guess is the remaining humans would find it relatively easy to reduce the infection rate below 1. Zombie movies and shows are for drama, not realism. You'd need 28 Days Later or Resident Evil style zombies to overwhelm well armed humans who employ strategy. But this is a fictional scenario we're arguing about.
        hprotagonist 6y ago
        yeah, we’re whiffing hard enough in real life..
- titzer 6y ago
  Could you explain where you got that "less than 1%" figure from?
  - gpm 6y ago
    The main thing to understand is that is infection fatality rate, not case fatality rate. IFR being the portion of the people who got the disease that died, and CFR being the portion of people who the medical systems finds out has the disease who die. The 1% number if support by a pretty wide variety of sources and studies that have all been relatively consistent in the 1%-0.1% order of magnitude - more recently they seem to have been converging on the 0.5% to 0.25% range (though I haven't been thorough enough in reading the literature to want to state that range confidently). A relatively recent and good example of such a study would be this one [1] from Germany. They sampled 600 people relatively randomly from the population, tested them all, and looked at the outcomes. [1] https://www.land.nrw/sites/default/files/asset/document/zwischenergebnis_covid19_case_study_gangelt_en.pdf https://www.land.nrw/sites/default/files/asset/document/zwis...
    - titzer 6y ago
      "Using data through April 20, 2020, we fit a statistical model to COVID-19 case fatality rates over time at the US county level to estimate the COVID-19 IFR among symptomatic cases (IFR-S) as time goes to infinity. The IFR-S in the US was estimated to be 1.3% (95% central credible interval: 0.6% to 2.1%). County-specific rates varied from 0.5% to 3.6%." https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200506.159053/full/ https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200506.15905...
      - gpm 6y ago
        Have you read that study? It's over-extrapolating from shit data with a overly fancy mathematical model. I don't fault the authors for trying, it is an interesting attempt, but I weight their results substantially less heavily when forming my world view. Not to mention which, some estimates of asymptomatic case rate go up to 50% (others substantially less so, it probably depends both on age range and what you define as asymptomatic) By the way, direct link to the study is https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00455?utm_campaign=covid19fasttrack&utm_medium=press&utm_content=basu&utm_source=mediaadvisory https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2020....
op03 6y ago
The 'Zombie Apocalypse' to me is more about being stuck somewhere(life/work situation) fully surrounded by living people who don't use their mind. And then you go about gathering a merry band to fight the mindless herd.
dhosek 6y ago
I recently read Max Brooks's World War Z and (a) even before Covid-19, he was able to lay out a plausible scenario of stupidity and selfishness that led to a global collapse and (2) as he's said in interviews [1] he couldn't have predicted how much dumber and selfish we would be in real life. [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/03/24/820601571/all-of-this-panic-could-have-been-prevented-author-max-brooks-on-covid-19 https://www.npr.org/2020/03/24/820601571/all-of-this-panic-c...

gpm 6y ago

Covid's death rate is less than 1%, if we saw a "zombie apocalypse" disease (death rate 100%... plus zombies) we'd see a very different reaction for a very good reason.

hprotagonist 6y ago
yes, we’d all be zombies.
- goatlover 6y ago
  100% death rates don't make for good pandemics and rabies-style viruses are poor spreaders, since you have to bite a victim.
  - gpm 6y ago
    The 4 billion American chestnut trees would like to disagree with your first assertion. Or at least they would like to if they weren't trees and weren't dead.
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      That one Aqua Teen episode is probably a preview of their reaction.
  - hprotagonist 6y ago
    well, a zombie pandemic is a 100% undeath rate... 0% dead but 100% contagious forever after is a practically unbounded r_0.
    - goatlover 6y ago
      If they are typical zombies who have to spread the contagion via bites and scratches, and are slow and stupid, then my guess is the remaining humans would find it relatively easy to reduce the infection rate below 1. Zombie movies and shows are for drama, not realism. You'd need 28 Days Later or Resident Evil style zombies to overwhelm well armed humans who employ strategy. But this is a fictional scenario we're arguing about.
      - hprotagonist 6y ago
        yeah, we’re whiffing hard enough in real life..
titzer 6y ago
Could you explain where you got that "less than 1%" figure from?
- gpm 6y ago
  The main thing to understand is that is infection fatality rate, not case fatality rate. IFR being the portion of the people who got the disease that died, and CFR being the portion of people who the medical systems finds out has the disease who die. The 1% number if support by a pretty wide variety of sources and studies that have all been relatively consistent in the 1%-0.1% order of magnitude - more recently they seem to have been converging on the 0.5% to 0.25% range (though I haven't been thorough enough in reading the literature to want to state that range confidently). A relatively recent and good example of such a study would be this one [1] from Germany. They sampled 600 people relatively randomly from the population, tested them all, and looked at the outcomes. [1] https://www.land.nrw/sites/default/files/asset/document/zwischenergebnis_covid19_case_study_gangelt_en.pdf https://www.land.nrw/sites/default/files/asset/document/zwis...
  - titzer 6y ago
    "Using data through April 20, 2020, we fit a statistical model to COVID-19 case fatality rates over time at the US county level to estimate the COVID-19 IFR among symptomatic cases (IFR-S) as time goes to infinity. The IFR-S in the US was estimated to be 1.3% (95% central credible interval: 0.6% to 2.1%). County-specific rates varied from 0.5% to 3.6%." https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200506.159053/full/ https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200506.15905...
    - gpm 6y ago
      Have you read that study? It's over-extrapolating from shit data with a overly fancy mathematical model. I don't fault the authors for trying, it is an interesting attempt, but I weight their results substantially less heavily when forming my world view. Not to mention which, some estimates of asymptomatic case rate go up to 50% (others substantially less so, it probably depends both on age range and what you define as asymptomatic) By the way, direct link to the study is https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00455?utm_campaign=covid19fasttrack&utm_medium=press&utm_content=basu&utm_source=mediaadvisory https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2020....

op03 6y ago

The 'Zombie Apocalypse' to me is more about being stuck somewhere(life/work situation) fully surrounded by living people who don't use their mind. And then you go about gathering a merry band to fight the mindless herd.

dhosek 6y ago

I recently read Max Brooks's World War Z and (a) even before Covid-19, he was able to lay out a plausible scenario of stupidity and selfishness that led to a global collapse and (2) as he's said in interviews [1] he couldn't have predicted how much dumber and selfish we would be in real life. [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/03/24/820601571/all-of-this-panic-could-have-been-prevented-author-max-brooks-on-covid-19 https://www.npr.org/2020/03/24/820601571/all-of-this-panic-c...