Monday, November 24, 2014

99 and 4/10ths Dead

In Stephen King's The Stand, an experimental flu virus, Captain Trips, kills 99.4 percent of Earth's population. That made me wonder how many people would be left on Earth of the events of The Stand happened today. Simple math reveals that out of 7.276 billion, 43,656,000 would survive Captain Trips, scattered all over the planet. That number of survivors could entirely repopulate Argentina with a couple of million left over; it couldn't quite repopulate Ukraine.

It's only natural to wonder how many Canadians could be expected to survive. The answer: about 200,000 people, or a little over the population of Regina, Saskatchewan. Of course all Canada's survivors wouldn't be concentrated in one place, so let's imagine how many survivors there might be in each province and territory:

Nunavut: 191

Yukon: 203

Northwest Territories: 249

Prince Edward Island: 841

Newfoundland and Labrador: 3,087

New Brunswick: 4,507

Nova Scotia: 5,531

Saskatchewan: 6,200

Manitoba: 7,250

Alberta: 21,872

British Columbia: 26,400

Quebec: 47,418

Ontario: 77,111

It's pretty sobering to imagine being one of 200,000 or so survivors in a country as vast as this one. Supposing that the electrical grid would take a little while to collapse, I suppose survivors could find each other by frantically posting on Twitter or making YouTube videos, since there's be virtually no competition for being at the top of the new content lists.