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Ever since 1978’s Dawn of the Dead the sequel film a decade after the original Night of the Living Dead the vision of the world overrun with shambling corpses has been the standard for projects using the monsters created by Romero.

But the math just doesn’t work.

For 2022 the mortality rate in the United States was about 982 persons dying each year per 100,000 of population. Even that number is a bit high has it includes excess mortality due to the COVID 19 pandemic. Averaging that out over a standard year, 365.25 days, that a daily mortality rate of 2.69 deaths per day per 100K people.

San Diego county where I live has a population of 3.3 million people which yields a daily death rate of 89 deaths per day.

Modern graves are not simply holes dug into the earth but concrete lined underground structures from which the walking dead could not escape so we only need concern ourselves with the unburied dead.

Most Americans are buried with 7 days of death. Multiply the daily death rate by 7 and we end up with 623 unburied dead to be reactivated into zombies on Zed Day.

623 versus a population of 3.3 million. The entire zombie army is about the size of a largish movie theater audience. Hardly the inescapable horde that can besiege countless building and paralyze all law enforcement and military units.

Before you can have the zombie apocalypse you need a massive die off of the human population that creates fields of corpses to be reactivated,