Replies

That's my thinking for the most part, except that I think that a large portion of the population suffered from the Active stage version of the virus right from the start. From everything we've heard on the show, it seems the apocalypse happened quickly and nobody really knows how it came about. It was a sudden onslaught and then civilization collapsed. There's simply no way that could've happened if all the virus did was reanimate those who died, because not enough people die every day to produce the necessary amount of Walkers to utterly annihilate civilization so quickly. It had to have killed some people right away, and probably a large segment of the population.

Let's assume I'm right and Patrick was uninfected, but was recently infected with the Zombie Virus. He was dead in less than a day after he started showing signs that he was sick, and his reanimation was practically instantaneous. And from previews it looks as if he's now going to be running into the cellblock and start munching on his sleeping roommates. If that is the Zombie Virus then that perfectly explains how things went down. Large swathes of the population died from the virus in less than a day after they were infected and then IMMEDIATELY reanimated and went on a rampage, likely killing or turning everyone around them. That would explain how the zombie hordes got so big so quickly and why no one really knows how it went down, because those who likely witnessed the effects of the disease were the first victims of the reanimated zombies, and with the speed with which those people died and reanimated there simply wasn't any time to study the situation. It seems that it went from business as usual to thousands of zombies one day, to millions of zombies the next day, and downhill from then on.

Actually, take a look at some of the infection simulations out there. If you assume a bite is toxic, and natural death means re-animation, global infection takes about a week.

Plenty fast enough for a pandemic to bring humanity to the brink of extinction.

http://kevan.org/proce55ing/zombies/