Consider that decades of zombie movies have reinforced the idea of a pandemic being a binary thing: you either live, or you become a zombie. No in between.

Zombie movies acclimated people to the idea of a pandemic having binary outcomes: life or death.

"one bite, one scratch" means death.

Imagine if they'd presented a spectrum instead. Some people who survive a bite or scratch, simply lose the ability to form long term memories. Or speak. Or recognize faces.

Where the most likely outcome of encountering a zombie was not death or surviving unscathed, but some degree of brain damage.

For each person who gets torn apart, 50 get lesions, only a small area of the brain going zombie instead of the whole thing.

Small dead spots.

Had zombie movies portrayed that, the pandemic as having a spectrum of bad outcomes instead of a binary, would that have changed the public's response to a real pandemic which produces a real spectrum of negative outcomes rather than a binary life/death?

I mentioned the 1889 pandemic, which only killed 1 million people but caused neurologically damaging fevers in literally half of some cities.

In living memory, not particularly lethal things like scarlet fever would not kill you, but would leave lasting damage.

But, that's been forgotten. In the decades since Romero, the popular image of a pandemic shifted from "even if you survive, it'll still fuck you up"

I'm being facetious here, focusing only on how zombie movies could have the influenced pop culture image of pandemics.

If you were born in 1960, odds are you had an uncle with a leg paralyzed by polio. A neighbor with unilateral hearing loss caused by mumps. A grandparent whose measles-induced encephalitis gave them epilepsy.

You would encounter people who had disfiguring facial scars from smallpox. People in their 30's, mostly women, with debilitating arthritis caused by childhood rubella.

In living memory, you were surrounded by the long-term effects of diseases.

You may have only known a handful of people who died to that outbreak, but you knew hundreds bearing its scars for the rest of their lives.

You probably had relatives made sterile from a measles infection they'd gotten as children. Relatives blinded by rubella, or given liver damage.

In living memory, people born before Night of the Living Dead, you feared a disease even if you didn't worry about it killing you.

You *saw* the spectrum of outcomes in everyday life. You knew it wasn't just life/death.

If you were old enough to watch Night of the Living Dead in theaters, you were old enough to have a friend your age with kidney damage from scarlet fever.

You were old enough to see them die of a heart attack in the 80's.

And all of that has been erased, forgotten.

The popular image of a pandemic, an epidemic, is binary life/death. People rarely consider the more likely outcome: survive, but with permanent illnesses.

I can't help but think that zombie fiction helped erase the memory of pandemics leaving you alive, but with disability.

How many pandemic movies have you seen where the risk wasn't "oh no everyone's gonna die" but "in 20 years everyone will be 4x more likely to have a stroke"