Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse: A Population Dynamics Based Approach

Abstract Living-dead creatures are recurrent in various folk myths and recently became an icon of popular culture. The “zombie-ism” is usually caused by an infectious-like disease that has no cure and ultimately inflicts most of the human population, leading to a Zombie Apocalypse. In this work, we propose an epidemiological model for a zombie outbreak. By introducing an infection parameter, we show that human survival is possible in certain scenarios. Furthermore, our model allows for three distinct dynamical regimes, only one of which accounts for the full blown Zombie Apocalypse. Our results are obtained both for a fully connected time continuous model and for a stochastic individual based approach.