Chicago Wouldn't Survive Long in a Zombie Apocalypse, Study Shows

A usual zombie story would mean running for your lives against these walking dead creatures or else you'd get bitten and infected and ended up being a zombie as well. Considering the probabilities, the extent of infection, and the time needed to turn a whole city into a legion of zombies, a model says Chicago will only need less than 60 days.

A group of researchers from Argonne National Laboratory tried some modelling approaches to understand the worst-case scenario that may happen in Chicago. Though the paper was not originally intended to measure the vulnerability of the place to a real zombie invasion, the concept was somewhat in line with infectious and alarming diseases, specifically MRSA and Ebola, and they only used the term "zombie" to earn the people's interest. Surprisingly, their model showed that in less than two months, the "zombie" disease may actually spread and cover millions of Chicago communities.

Lead by Chick Macal, director of the Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems Simulation, Decision, and Information Sciences Division at Argonne National Laboratory, the team tried to spice up their agent-based modelling by employing the idea of zombie virus which may spread through the city. The model was challenging the possible interventions and its effect. According to their outcome, there is a small light of hope to save humanity from zombie invasion for their worst case but employing strategies such as training the people to fight and kill zombies as well as improved communications from the government and the uninfected people on the current zombie locations have been giving some good chances.

Watch: The video simulations done by Macal and his team

"This offers great promise for countering the zombie apocalypse in Chicago," Macal said on a press release. "This work allowed us to understand and do a better job for finding interventions that result in better outcomes, or even optimal outcomes -- better solutions," he added.

The city model, named as ChiSIM, helped in simulating different scenarios intended for the city of Chicago. It is specially designed to model and experiment with different possible scenarios for the almost three million Chicago citizens, including a good representation of more than two million locations found in the city. The team believes that their results will be very much helpful for the policy makers in drafting their plans to battle with real-life infectious diseases that may endanger Chicago and its constituents.