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Given how many guns there are in the USA and how many bullets, if upstate NY had 1 month to prepare I don't think any amount of shuffling zombies would 'make it' past Albany. Motivated Americans with backhoes and excavators, dry vans and jersey walls would erect ad hoc walled cities everywhere with kill zones and quarantine 'air locks' for anyone coming in. Hunter-killer drones would become a regular feature - armed with kel-tec .22s with 30 round mags..... there would be forays into Manhattan and closer burbs.



Seriously, unless it's something that spreads like the flu, it would be contained and wiped out. Now, surviving the loss of 30-40% of the US population dead or eaten in the major cities would be a challenge. The long term federal, state, and municipal financial situation would be adjusted - the entitlements wouldn't be paid out but of course taxes wouldn't come in either. Political blocks would shift dramatically. Culturally, that much death and loss would do weird things to the survivors' morals in surprising ways. We might become surprisingly humanitarian and serious about raising children again. Alot of shenannigans would simple die out with the zombies. Survivors ain't got no time for the obsessions currently occupying us.

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If Russia took ebola and mixed it with Measles and released it, 90% of the globe would die within 30 days unless people went full retard in quarantine, keeping at least a few miles between the sick and the healthy.

Now, Russia is not insane so it wouldn't do it. But that's a truly nightmare scenario given how awful ebola is and how contagious measles are. Mix the two and we're all dead or incredibly lucky.

In any event zombies are stand in for sudden revolution or sudden removal of the vast majority of our fellow countrymen. If the ice storms revealed how unprepared people in general are to survive without the electrical grid and stocked store shelves, imagine what would happen if the line men, electrical crews and folks actually running the power plants didn't show up to work because they were all dead or incapacitated or scared to come in.

In such a scenario, there's no way a federal agency could do more than prepare for just a skeleton 'shadow' government to function- and then just barely. The problem with a shadow government is two fold. 1) no one knows who they are so their authority is immediately suspect 2) to the degree people come to accept them as authorities to listen to, people will want the safety, food, etc. that they are expected to have in abundance....

The best plan for contingencies like this would be to promote self-sufficiency in as many non-governmental citizens as possible but then that's the rational move. The typical historical move is to be stupid and seek to monopolize the ability to survive to the few (and stupid) resulting in a net greater loss of life than otherwise would occur if 'we the people' had more flexibility and freedom.