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Want to avoid the zombie apocalypse? Move to the countryside

Researchers at Cornell conclude U.S. would be 'largely doomed'

Call it rural Canada’s revenge.

In the event of a zombie outbreak, the more isolated you are, the less likely it is you’ll end up snack food for the undead, according to a new study.

A team of researchers at Cornell University is using an outbreak of the fictional disease to hone their statistical modelling for the spread of disease.

They ran thousands of simulations of a zombie outbreak and they found highly populated areas are at the greatest risk.

“It took a while for zombies to make their way out to remote, rural areas,” said Alex Alemi, a graduate student in theoretical physics at Cornell University and the lead author.

“I can’t speak in specifics to Canada, but the general point is that you want to be as far away from as many people as possible.”

Which makes most of Canada pretty ideal during an outbreak.

The undead are going through quite a revival in popular culture, thanks in part to the hit show The Walking Dead. The U.S. Center for Disease Control even uses a zombie apocalypse to promote emergency preparedness.

In the movies, however, a zombie outbreak seems to affect all areas at the same time. Months after the first bite, there remain small pockets of survivors.

“But in our attempt to model zombies somewhat realistically, it doesn’t seem like this is how it would actually go down,” Alemi says.

He and his colleagues used statistical mechanics, computational chemistry and mathematical modelling of an outbreak in the continental U.S.

By the end of the first week, most of the population has joined the ranks of the undead. The dense coastal regions fell faster than the more sparsely populated centre of the country.

“After four weeks, much of the United States has fallen, but it takes a very long time for the zombies to diffuse and capture the remaining portions of the United States,” the study says.

“Even four months in, remote areas of Montana and Nevada remain zombie free.”

A hypothetical zombie outbreak is obviously very different from a real disease, Alemi points out.

“They’re the undead. They don’t get better… so the results can’t say much about an ordinary outbreak,” he says.

But aside from the hunger for human flesh and all the decapitating, the techniques used in their simulations of the spread of the disease are the same used to study real outbreaks, Alemi says.

“It’s meant to be fun but part of what we’re going for is we’re hoping people will find it fun and it might introduce people to some of those techniques.”

Alemi and his colleagues will present their findings Thursday at a meeting of the American Physical Society in San Antonio, Texas.