Watch Scientists Predict How Quickly A Zombie Virus Would Wipe Out Chicago

By Stephen Gossett in News on Nov 1, 2016 6:33PM

With both Halloween and that grisly Walking Dead premiere perhaps still fresh in mind, researchers at Argonne National Laboratory shifted their predictive studies away from trifles like the potential spread of Ebola and MRSA onto an even more potentially devastating scenario: the Zombie Apocalypse!

In some respects, the results were pretty bleak. “Two million people are zombified by day 60,” according Argonne. And that was best-case scenario. Yikes. Watch how fast our city is overcome with red in the video above—replete with eerie horror-flick soundtrack.

But the good news is that, after running a variety of variables, they located a decent counterattack, one that relies on “improving people’s defensive actions with better offensive tactics.”

“A small minority of computer simulation runs really gave us a lot of hope that we could affect the outcome to counter the zombie apocalypse,” Chick Macal, an engineer at Argonne’s Global Security Sciences Division, told the Tribune. “Zombies were contained, and there wasn’t massive spreading beyond a small number of places where the zombie outbreak began. So I think there’s a lot of hope there.”

So it sounds like we’d be looking more at a bloodied-but-unbowed Contagion-style situation rather than full-blown Dawn of the Dead havoc.

Hooray, logical emergency administration!