Wildfire Virus & Walkers
Aug. 26th, 2016 06:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dirtyredneckThe Walking and the Dead
Daryl is an active carrier of the Wildfire Virus. Everyone in his universe is infected and if he dies for any reason, if his brain is not damaged to the point of non-functioning, his body will re-animate and get back up to bite people. It will take between 2 minutes and 8 hours for this to happen.
It is unknown how the virus spreads, but it is a pathogen that is likely airborn (and definitely able to be contracted through water/blood) due to how fast it spread once it went global (which was about four months after it was first discovered by governments; we meet Daryl and the other camp survivors about two months after it went global). There is some suggestion that there were people immune or did not catch it (as there were dead bodies in car pile ups that had died without obvious head trauma and did not get back up), but as they are all long since dead, everyone in his world is now a carrier.
More on the specifics of the virus can be found here. Notably, it is not the pathogen itself that kills a person, since it is an active infection that everyone already has. That detail is not known to anyone in canon and they assume the infection is dormant until someone is either bitten/scratched (and the 'active' virus comes over from the walker), or they die.
What This Means
Because of how it spreads, anyone who has close contact with Daryl has the potential of contracting the virus and becoming a carrier themselves. It only becomes apparent someone is a carrier if they die and their brain is not damaged to the point of non-functioning.
The virus can be spread by:
Drinking from the same water bottle as a carrier (high potential)
Getting sneezed on by a carrier (high potential)
Touching the blood of a carrier (low potential)
Getting the blood of a carrier in an open wound (extremely high potential)
Mixing bodily fluids with those of a carrier (high potential)
Why not Zombies?
It is canon in the TV-verse that zombie fiction was never a thing. The term was never coined, they did not have movies like Night of the Living Dead or video games like Left 4 Dead. That entire genre of horror fiction never happened. The closest they ever came was Frankenstein, which isn't really comparable.
This is not the case in the Comic-verse, in which the characters purposely choose not to call them zombies and have a discussion about it relatively early in the story.
Daryl is an active carrier of the Wildfire Virus. Everyone in his universe is infected and if he dies for any reason, if his brain is not damaged to the point of non-functioning, his body will re-animate and get back up to bite people. It will take between 2 minutes and 8 hours for this to happen.
It is unknown how the virus spreads, but it is a pathogen that is likely airborn (and definitely able to be contracted through water/blood) due to how fast it spread once it went global (which was about four months after it was first discovered by governments; we meet Daryl and the other camp survivors about two months after it went global). There is some suggestion that there were people immune or did not catch it (as there were dead bodies in car pile ups that had died without obvious head trauma and did not get back up), but as they are all long since dead, everyone in his world is now a carrier.
More on the specifics of the virus can be found here. Notably, it is not the pathogen itself that kills a person, since it is an active infection that everyone already has. That detail is not known to anyone in canon and they assume the infection is dormant until someone is either bitten/scratched (and the 'active' virus comes over from the walker), or they die.
What This Means
Because of how it spreads, anyone who has close contact with Daryl has the potential of contracting the virus and becoming a carrier themselves. It only becomes apparent someone is a carrier if they die and their brain is not damaged to the point of non-functioning.
The virus can be spread by:
Why not Zombies?
It is canon in the TV-verse that zombie fiction was never a thing. The term was never coined, they did not have movies like Night of the Living Dead or video games like Left 4 Dead. That entire genre of horror fiction never happened. The closest they ever came was Frankenstein, which isn't really comparable.
This is not the case in the Comic-verse, in which the characters purposely choose not to call them zombies and have a discussion about it relatively early in the story.