Zombies might be a threat for the first days or weeks. People aren’t used to killing, especially not things that look human, especially things that might look like a friend or family member. People would hesitate, or screw up, or think they were safe, or whatever.
But, after a short time people would either learn to fight zombies, or they’d become zombies.
Good zombie fiction isn’t really about the zombies, it’s about the breakdown of society. Bad zombie fiction has people still fighting zombies multiple years after the outbreak started.
The thing I wish you’d see sometimes in zombie fiction is no zombies. Like, a few months after the outbreak, a group of humans completely eliminates 100% of the zombies from a big island or peninsula so people within that area can live normally. It might require killing a million zombies, but that’s only 1000 zombies each by 1000 people. That’s only about 30 zombies a day for a month per person, which should be pretty easy for a dedicated, competent zombie killer. Instead, the most you get is a small walled town with countless zombies on the walls.
It just makes no sense that you typically see every survivor killing dozens of zombies per hour every day and they don’t seem to be making a dent in the local zombie population.
To be fair, we still have a covid pandemic going on because people are not smart enough to do the smart thins. They will hide their ingections, the infection screenings will be done by incpmpetent people, the rich and dumb elite will preserve zombies as “exotic pets” they show off to their friend because “they have money, so rules don’t apply to them”, and sentimental idiots won’t let go of their turned loved ones. Not to mention the otherwise entitled people who just blatantly disregard every precaution because “You can’t limit my freedom with this hoax”.
But yeah, in ideal world, the zombie outbreak would be dealt swiftly.
Yeah, but that’s because COVID isn’t 100% fatal, whereas zombie bites are 100% fatal.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that people would be more cautious of a Zombie outbreak, it just means that the dumb ones would be awarded Darwins much more swiftly, leaving only the more cautious ones behind.