Counter: The just dead one who is trying to eat its way out of his mother is, in fact, pretty dangerous.
Newborns seldom have teeth (the rare baby is born with a tooth or 2 What To Do for a Baby Born With Teeth), are too weak to hold their heads up for very long and have no control over their arms/fingers. The Z-Nation baby was able to move pretty fast but it wasn’t a newborn (there was a carseat in the car) and it was made for laughs.
As far as zombies without a total apocalypse story I enjoyed The Zee Brothers ebooks: Amazon.com
If you are in a more light-hearted vein read *Apocalypse Cow *and World War Moo.
The original NOTLD thing doesn’t worry me much. With modern burial habits (making it harder to claw your way out of the grave) we only have to worry about the newly dead and I think that would get under control fairly fast; say a year with maybe 10% dead in the US and maybe 20-25% world-wide. The hard thing is getting folks to overcome centuries of ritual to deal with the crisis (thing Last Man on Earth and the like). The only case where I would see almost a wipe back 200 years or more would be the high-speed meth-PCP zombies of some of the remakes. Those kind would be so brutal so quick that they could gain the upper hand.
Still, losing 10% of the US population and 25% worldwide would be one hell of a blow to the world economy. That’s worldwide depression level stuff right there. It means crop issues and revolution in less stable countries. This thing is going to be a mess.
In terms of burial rituals I can honestly see that being an issue. Certainly in West Africa there are problems with traditional body washing habits with the newly dead that spread the disease. According to the WHO the last major outbreak there could attribute 60% of the cases to people washing bodies of the newly dead. Ugh.
And that’s with a remarkably contagious disease. Zombie virus could be more subtle and some habits are very hard to break.
Did you mean to include the word “ebola” somewhere in that post?
Yeah, the problems of reading a WHO report while posting.
And hey, we made Cecil’s FaceBook page today!
One thing that everybody seems to be forgetting about large numbers of kids was that birth control didn’t really work. Condoms were just sheep intestines sewn up, and the rhythm method was the only other form of birth control. So if a reasonably healthy man and woman had vaginal intercourse, nine months later you would wind up with kids.
An interesting read is “The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman. It’s a non fiction about what would happen if humans suddenly disappeared for any reason. It covers thing like what would happen long term in cities when sewers and storm water drains get clogged up and nobody around to unclog them.
The book and movie The Girl With All The Gifts actually addresses that somewhat - but spoilered because it is a spoiler of a plot point.
Zombies in that scenario are called “hungries” and there are kids who became “hungries” in the womb… and ate their way out of their mothers. The upside is that such kids are, under the right circumstances, intelligent, articulate, and educable. The problem is they still have a dreadful tendency to attack and eat normal people under other circumstances.