(Part 2) Top products from r/postapocalyptic
We found 2 product mentions on r/postapocalyptic. We ranked the 22 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
Those non-perishable food stores would be depleted. 7 billion people aren't going to die over night.
The spread of the virus will be swift. One of the causes of the 1918 epidemic was increased travel. Times that factor by about a thousand, now. Air travel is a virus's best friend. So, it's going to get everywhere, fast.
What will be different from the 1918 epidemic is that less of the world now suffers from contributory factors that existed in 1918. So even though the spread would be more rapid, people would be able to hold on longer before finally succumbing. This extended timeline means you have to provide services to them. Water and food being the top of the list.
The production of necessities would drop to zero or near zero before the final curtain drops. (Workers are sick or dead, or have fled to where they think they will be safe.) Those stocked stores and warehouses would be cleaned out in a matter of a couple of months. Probably weeks.
Lets remember, for the sake of this scenario, the mortality rate is ultimately going to be 98%. No matter what.
Technology: Forget about it. You'll lose electricity within weeks of the final death toll. Those plants need constant attention. Then add in the nuclear plants melting down. All of them going down around the world at the same time is going to create another wave of death, and create uninhabitable lands.
You'll have cars for a little bit, but that will disappear quickly.
If you're sticking to the OP's two year scenario, yes, with the exception of the food, there would be things that would work for awhile. But I said at the outset that I was addressing further down the road. Two years is just everyone still in shock and digging for potatoes. Things are going to change and evolve from the initial few years.
Remember, there are only 140,000,000 people in the entire world. No idea how many people have what skill sets, where they are: widely dispersed, pockets of them highly concentrated in certain areas. That's not very many people. But they're going to be widely distributed around the planet.
We have 326,000,000 people in the U.S. So out of 140,000,000 survivors around the world, how many do you realistically think will be here, or in any country for that matter.
The best book I've ever read on this scenario, and I'm sure most people in this sub have read is, Earth Abides, by John Stewart. It's fiction, but it's a pretty good representation of what this would be like.
For another "realistic" depiction of a small-scale nuclear war, check out the book Warday and the Journey Onward. It's very similar in feel to World War Z in that it's told in a series of interviews, but it was written in the 80s. It's also chock full of charts and graphs on the (fictional) effects of the war on the US.
Edit: I had thought the idea of a "nuclear winter" had died out a bit since the 80s, but according to the Wikipedia article a study in 2007 also suggested temperature drops of ice age proportions.
And this is an interesting predicted nuclear strike and fallout map.
Edit2: Sorry, this is a nice source too. It posits the effects of a full-scale war between the USSR and NATO and then runs the results forward several decades.