Let’s consider the following zombie outbreak scenario, which in the movies, books, comics, etc. typically turns into an apocalypse.
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Some kind of government, military, or top secret corporate experiment goes wrong. Some of the test subjects, or maybe some innocent bystanders, become infected and turn into zombies.
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The zombies begin attacking other people. If you get bitten or scratched you turn into a zombie a few hours or days later.
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The newly infected zombies perpetuate the cycle.
There are two other factors that seem to be typical in zombie stories that I think would lead to this cycle not taking hold.
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The reason zombies attack other people is because they are hungry and want to eat living human brains.
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The only way to kill a zombie is by destroying the brain.
Wouldn’t this mean that most of the victims of a zombie would just straight up die rather than turn into zombies themselves since the zombie that attacked them ate their brain? If most of the victims just die without reanimating, would a full blown pandemic be able to take hold? It would seem that the only new zombies would be from people that were injured by a zombie but managed to escape before getting killed and having their brain eaten. Once word got out about what was going, I think zombie injuries would be very rare. Wouldn’t most encounters with zombies either lead to the living person being killed or escaping without injury, limiting the extent of the outbreak?
Feel free to criticize my premises as not being typical