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Most of the media zombie scenarios create very hostile environments and rapid breakdown of society. They're essentially engineered to create this situation. The zombies spread the disease actively. Near 100% conversion rate (immunities or asymptomatic cases are extremely rare). Incubating individuals will turn on those around them. And of course there often is a lack of genre awareness, the very concept of a zombie apocalypse is unknown.

This converts almost the entire population into hostiles. If you don't get all combative you become part of the zombie horde. So there's a huge selection bias.

This is hardly comparable to covid where essential functions of society are still working and the infected are not going out of their way to infect more people. And even now we're already seeing countries finger-pointing and adopting an everyone-for-themselves attitude around medical equipment.



Most of the infected aren't going out of their way and infecting people. A small number of the infected are acting with, at least, reckless disregard for the possibility of infecting others.


There has been one study on the influenza virus that says that people who are asymptomatic are more social than normal.

The simple hypotheses is that the virus wants the host to spread as much as possible.


That was a small evo-psych study (38 people) and it wasn’t a study of the flu but rather the vaccine so there are other possibilities. It’s certainly possible but I’d avoid giving it much weight without more data.




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