This sort of scenario just popped into my head yesterday.
In TWD, everyone was infected and turned when they died by any means and their brain wasn't destroyed. For the purposes of this exercise, homicide is the death of a person as a direct consequence of the actions of another, so includes murder, manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter, accidents as a result of human error, armed conflict, etc. A walker biting someone also counts.
The CDC reported roughly 13,000 violent deaths in the US in 2010, the start of the show, or about 35 homicides a day. Extrapolated to the rest of the world (tenuous since death rates are obviously different in different countries), our baseline global zombie population growth is 1200/day, which is pretty close to the figure given by the UN. This is roughly 1% of the global death rate in 2010. For ease of calculation, I'm assuming that the number of homicides that result in brain destruction are marginal.
Is this still enough walkers to collapse society? How quickly could society figure it out and adapt to get homicides to zero? This is also the TWD universe so they don't know what zombies are.
Mutators:
- Baseline 'revenants' instead become the runners from Daryl Dixon and have acid blood.
- Add suicides, an additional 2000 to the global baseline. Ignore brain destruction or restraint (i.e. hanging).
Edit: thought the show started in 2013, adjusted figures to 2010 though it didn't have much impact