Zombie Safety Series: I’ve Got Good News and Bad News

It’s Dead Week, and everyone’s walking around like shambling corpses, so it seemed only fitting to write about zombies.

The other day, I realized my Safety Series was overlooking a crucial fact. I never considered how the zombie virus was transmitted. If it’s only transmissible by bite, everything I said still goes. However…

If the virus is airborne, we’re all doomed.

Doomed.

On the bright side, history and biology set good precedents for the complete non-airborne-ness of the zombie virus. The thing you have to remember is that viruses are (sort of) living things, and all living things have been hard-wired to survive and reproduce. For viruses, that means forming new populations by infecting new hosts. Therefore, any given virus wants to infect as many hosts as possible.

Really virulent viruses (and I think we can all agree the zombie virus qualifies as really virulent) tend to be waterborne. (The relevant info is about halfway through the video, but the whole thing is worth watching.) Airborne viruses, like the common cold, tend to be less nasty. After all, airborne viruses need their hosts up and walking around and breathing on people. The Black Plague, on the other hand, is just as capable of riding in fleas that bite dying people as it is capable of riding in fleas that bite non-dying people. This all seems to indicate that the zombie virus is transmissible by fluids only.

Here’s the rub. This virus’s symptoms are rather unique. While the zombie virus does kill its hosts, it also keeps them walking around. And anything still walking around is still capable of passing on an airborne pathogen.

So, the bad news is I really have no idea whether the virus would be airborne or not. The good news is I hear there’s a sale on gas masks at the local supermarket.