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A popular story line is that some rapidly spreading plague kills 95% of the human population. That's 7,125,000,000 decomposing bodies that have to be dealt with quickly before flies and bacteria spread "normal" disease to the remaining 375,000,000 (hungry, traumatized, disorganized) people.

The Black Death took 7 years to kill about 50% of Europe. That gave time to dig mass burial pits. This, though, is at a whole different — and seemingly impossible — scale.

(Note: The plague has two weeks of symptomless infectious stage, and then a rapid (few days) death.)

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    $\begingroup$ The Black Death generally lasted less than a year in a specific region, during which time it killed everyone it was going to kill then died out. Western Europe was generally affected all within 1347-1348. After that it spread to ancillary areas of Europe (Scandanavia, northern Rusia) and into Arabia. So the problem is even harder than in your statement. Within a few months, a third to half the population in any given area dies. $\endgroup$
    – kingledion
    Dec 5, 2016 at 15:11
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    $\begingroup$ @RonJohn Can you specify a time line of how fast the disease spreads, how long an infected person has before they die, and how strong infected are before they die? For example, does 95% of the world's population die within a week of patient zero getting infected, or over the course of a year? That will greatly influence the possibilities. $\endgroup$
    – Thom Blair III
    Dec 5, 2016 at 15:31
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    $\begingroup$ An important point that most of the answers seem to miss is why do the 5% survive? Is it immunity or do they never come in contact with disease vectors? In the former case, they still need to move away from the rotten corpses for reasons of hygiene, but in the latter case they will have to take extra percautions with water and food supplies. $\endgroup$
    – Mad Physicist
    Dec 5, 2016 at 16:00
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    $\begingroup$ How rapid is rapid? This question cannot be answered properly without that factor. $\endgroup$
    – Erin Thursby
    Dec 5, 2016 at 16:18
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    $\begingroup$ This is an Arquade-quality hot-network-questions-list title. $\endgroup$
    – ApproachingDarknessFish
    Dec 6, 2016 at 9:02

19 Answers 19

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Meta-logistics for the author

The problem that you — as the author — have is this: how do you kill off 95% of the world's population by means of a plague, without having the corpses cause so much health problems that you drag down the remaining 5% too?

The answer is: you do not. It is not credible to kill 19 in 20 people and then have the remainders live happily ever after.

So instead you kill off, say, 65% of the world's population with the plague, and the remaining 30% you want to get rid off will be from secondary effects caused by rotting corpses everywhere, mass starvation, breakdown of sanitation and medicine, loss of heating / cooling, loss of fresh water, environmental disasters and so on.

Adjust these numbers as you see fit and that seems credible. The point is that you include the secondary effects from the blight into your count and then make that combined count end up on 95%.

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    $\begingroup$ The typical Zombie tropes always bothered me for this. Sure they will make you sick if they bite you, and turn you, but what about all the other diseases decomposing flesh (mobile one at that) will spread? I highly doubt a real world The Walking Dead would last 2 seasons... $\endgroup$
    – Drunken Code Monkey
    Dec 6, 2016 at 4:24
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    $\begingroup$ @DrunkenCodeMonkey, and that's before they get mice $\endgroup$
    – Separatrix
    Dec 6, 2016 at 15:32
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    $\begingroup$ @Separatrix ...let alone zombie mice (if it's the kind of virus than can affect animals) $\endgroup$
    – xDaizu
    Dec 7, 2016 at 8:45
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    $\begingroup$ Indeed, I suspect that the actual percentage loss from the primary cause could be much lower than 65%, provided that the losses were close enough to 100% in some key job, such as power-plant operators, without whom a lot of things people need to live no longer work. With no power for refrigeration, what little food there is spoils, as do many medicines. The factories that make those things will not be able to operate without power, so as those supplies run out/spoil, people start dying of other causes. $\endgroup$
    – Monty Harder
    Dec 7, 2016 at 18:18
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    $\begingroup$ @Durandal You mean exactly like I wrote in the answer? $\endgroup$
    – MichaelK
    Dec 8, 2016 at 21:21
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Leave Them

The logistics of collecting the remains to cremate them would be overwhelming - by the time so few people got to even a small percentage, the rest would be quickly decomposing, making collection next to impossible. The rest of mankind would most probably be concentrating more on survival than disposing of the dead.

The only real course of action I think is to retreat to a safe area and let nature do the work of disposing of the remains.

Grind the bones down at a suitable time - you're going to need that fertiliser...

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    $\begingroup$ Totally agree that nobody will have the time or energy to deal with mass burials. I'd add that the survivors shoud move to a higher area with fresh water supplies, and cleanup the corpses only in that area. $\endgroup$
    – Mindwin Remember Monica
    Dec 5, 2016 at 15:22
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    $\begingroup$ What are these "safe areas"? Wouldn't early survivors fleeing cities bring the pathogen with them? $\endgroup$
    – RonJohn
    Dec 5, 2016 at 23:15
  • $\begingroup$ starving housepets will take care of a lot of the bodies for you, as will other scavengers. Of course they need to clear out wherever they flee to but a few small mass graves are good for that. $\endgroup$
    – John
    Dec 6, 2016 at 5:37
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    $\begingroup$ @RonJohn The idea I think is that some people survive the disease. That is not that they don't get it since they are not exposed, but either they turn out to be immune they manage to fight it off after being sick. The safe areas are then just areas which don't contain too many dead and dying to create secondary problems such as water,food contamination and other diseases. $\endgroup$
    – DRF
    Dec 6, 2016 at 9:25
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I agree with all of the other answers. I suppose it depends on how quickly people are dying:

  • If people are dying slowly enough that survivors can burn them, that would be ideal. One helpful factor here is that every person that dies leaves behind a certain amount of burnable materials -- clothing, bedding, chairs, houses, cars, etc. So, if survivors can stay safe while collecting bodies and fuel for cremation, that would be ideal. Perhaps bodies should be loaded into cars, then set the cars on fire. It would be a very toxic, smoky environment, but it could be a last resort cremation solution if clean burning fuel can't be gathered fast enough.

    People should be very careful, though, to make sure any fires are easily contained, since there will be no fire department to put out the fire if it spreads out of control. Perhaps large parking lots could provide a relatively safe burning station where embers won't easily fly to nearby burnables. Weather will be an important factor here in making sure the fires don't spread--excessively dry areas will require extra caution, while rainy areas can prevent easy cremation.

  • If people are dying too quickly to be burned, then decomposition becomes a major factor:

    enter image description here

    People would need to move a safe distance away during this time and wait for full decomposition. After a year has passed, much of the decomposition will be complete, particularly if bodies have been left outside. Survivors should then be cautious when reentering sealed environments (buildings, cars, etc.) because incomplete decomposition might leave disease vectors.

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  • $\begingroup$ I guess the question here is how many people are you tasking with body collection and how long will it take to retrieve a significant amount of the remains within 3 days (longer than that and you'll have flies/infection hazard). $\endgroup$
    – user10945
    Dec 5, 2016 at 15:08
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    $\begingroup$ Yes, the exact time line will play a crucial part in determining what is possible. $\endgroup$
    – Thom Blair III
    Dec 5, 2016 at 15:10
  • $\begingroup$ Yep, which is why I discounted it as a possibility. Sure, you can dispose of remains within a certain distance. But the further you go, the more spread out your resources get and you lose efficiency (esp as you factor in transport and building local incinerators). And what's more important? Rebuilding civilisation or taking care of the dead? $\endgroup$
    – user10945
    Dec 5, 2016 at 15:13
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    $\begingroup$ Well, the speed of death was not specified. "Rapidly spreading" is subjective -- if 95% of a city all died within 3 hours of patient zero being exposed, that is a very different scenario from one where people get are dying at a rate of 1% per day. Even at a rate of 1% per day, people could be infected, yet still not die for weeks, possibly giving them time to help with disposal. 1% per day would still be incomprehensibly devastating, yet very different from 95% in 24 hours. $\endgroup$
    – Thom Blair III
    Dec 5, 2016 at 15:22
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    $\begingroup$ @ThomBlairIII Yes, and something that kills that fast would not have time to spread, unless the incubation period is long. Even so, deaths would be staggered depending on exposure. $\endgroup$
    – Erin Thursby
    Dec 5, 2016 at 16:22
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Given the massive scale of the death and lack of people remaining, the consensus answers are let the bodies decompose while you move to a safe area. This is indeed the correct answer, unless there is some compelling reason that the bodies need to be disposed of right away.

If we assume the human remains are still a disease vector (the killer bacteria remain viable even in decomposing flesh), then disposal by fire is probably the best way to deal with this. For the most part, we can assume people will not simply drop dead in the street at random, but have been infected and are dying in their homes or hospitals as the disease symptoms weaken them and confine them to bed. Assuming the time of year is right (high summer is ideal), the survivors could attempt to commit the largest acts of arson in history and torch residential neighbourhoods and hospitals, ensuring the bodies contained within the houses and buildings will be consumed in the fire.

The two huge problems with this are building codes, which make burning modern buildings difficult, and control. Modern buildings are generally designed in such a way as to minimize the ability of fire to destroy them. In modern steel and concrete construction (office buildings, apartment blocks, hospitals, factories etc.) the danger isn't the structure catching fire, but the internal fittings like furniture, carpets and so on. Deaths in these fires is often due to smoke inhalation rather than burning, so unless circumstances are ideal, torching an apartment tower and ensuring the bodies are consumed will be far more difficult than just showing up with a deck of matches and a can of gasoline.

The second issue is you might actually be too successful. If the fires begin to converge, or there is a huge source of fire to keep the conditions in the city ideal for burning (recently the Canadian city of Fort McMurray was consumed in a firestorm, but the city was essentially surrounded by a massive forest fire raining burning embers on the city and knocking out power and emergency services), then anything you might want to salvage from the city will also be destroyed. This is a consideration even if you are just looking at neighbourhoods, burning a house down might spread to engulf the local supermarket, eliminating a source of stored canned goods and light duty equipment that would be useful to you.

However even expedient arson might not provide the solution. Human tissue is full of water, and it takes a lot of energy to completely burn a human (roughly 100 kilojoules simply to vaporize the water, before combustion takes place). A burning building isn't a controlled environment, and ensuring you have enough heat sustained for the right amount of time on the bodies is problematic. The worst case scenario is you burned down the city, destroyed your source of supplies and still didn't dispose of the bodies.

Far better to just move far away into the countryside and wait for nature to take its course.

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I'm assuming you don't want to have 7 billion bodies rotting all over your world and this is the reason for your question.

A couple of options:

  1. Bodies are left to decay on their own except in the area the survivors are living in/around - survivors will clean out living spaces for themselves for obvious reasons

  2. If you kill the population off slower, people will have time to get to a hospital and/or get put into quarantine zones - bodies will pile up in fewer, smaller areas and people will flee some areas both of which will leave huge swaths of land unpopulated (clean of bodies)

  3. You could have the disease itself speed up the decaying process to eliminate the bodies faster - the disease could liquefy a body in days

  4. Or you could also have mother nature speed up the decaying process by a sudden explosion in the rat population (rats could be immune to the disease)

Adjust your initial kill rate of 95% or survivors would either have to be immune to the disease itself or the disease doesn't survive in the bodies.

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Assuming this is modern-day Earth, you're ignoring a multitude of different cultural and religious burial practices. Even if you somehow managed to impose a directive on the entire world, people in many regions would simply refuse to comply because they have specific rites that "need" to be performed when someone dies. I'll give just one example. A partial reason for the Ebola outbreak in western Africa 2 years ago is because local death rituals necessitated fully washing the body of the deceased. This, of course, made spread of the virus very easy. Even when people were educated about it, they insisted on performing their rites according to custom. I don't have all of the answers to give you, but if you're going to write a "realistic" story, you might consider investigating this angle.

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    $\begingroup$ "Even if you somehow managed to impose a directive on the entire world" No directive needed. After 95% of humanity dies, the survivors could not care less for such matters (rituals etc) compared to their practical issues of survival. $\endgroup$
    – Hejazzman
    Dec 7, 2016 at 13:39
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    $\begingroup$ I think my very real Ebola example undercuts your argument. $\endgroup$
    – Charles Burge
    Dec 7, 2016 at 14:59
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I think the biological mass of 7 billion people is actually reasonably small (all things considered). Assuming they're just corpses (and not roaming zombies), the survivors can probably all easily find areas entirely uncontaminated by the decomposition of the dead. Think about it - how far do you have to drive (bike, run) to get to an area where you have a few square miles of land that has no people on it (answer - even in the U.S. not very far - Australia? Africa? South America?... other than the very densely populated areas, it's MOSTLY empty space).

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    $\begingroup$ If I abandon my home in the city to escape to a few square miles of open wilderness, I'm going to need a lot more than just a few square miles of open ground to support myself. I will need shelter, weapons for hunting (and maybe protection), tools, etc. So it'd be better to do something with the bodies in town so I can scavenge what I need without facing disease from thousands of decaying bodies. $\endgroup$
    – Johnny
    Dec 7, 2016 at 7:04
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    $\begingroup$ @Johnny, "better" may not be an option. Depending on where you are, you're talking about hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of decaying bodies. So, sure, travel far enough that you're near a town with some very small population and then do your best to incinerate what you can - but it's almost certainly too big a task and as I said the open wilderness is VAST. Grab what you can and head to higher ground so that you're drinking water upstream of all the decay. $\endgroup$
    – Yevgeny Simkin
    Dec 7, 2016 at 7:18
  • $\begingroup$ @Johnny a farm house will provide all of that. $\endgroup$
    – cde
    Dec 8, 2016 at 0:31
  • $\begingroup$ @cde farm houses typically have farmers living (because rural folk are less likely to come in contact with the pathogen) in them, and they typically have guns. $\endgroup$
    – RonJohn
    Jul 31, 2019 at 3:42
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I'd imagine that a zone would be created where the survivors would live, including an exclusion zone. The best way to get rid of the bodies would probably be cremation.

Slowly as more area is needed remains can be removed from other areas, although if they wait long enough earths natural mechanics will also dispose of the problem.

Survivors would need to make sure their water table doesn't become affected though.

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    $\begingroup$ Building on your answer, I'd say the best solution would be to congregate sparsely populated areas (like farmlands), and clear the few the bodies there. All the necessary implements for a self sustaining community should be available there, where they could wait out the total decomposition of the plague victims. $\endgroup$
    – Lu22
    Dec 5, 2016 at 12:53
  • $\begingroup$ (1) No "survival zone". The 375,000,000 would be spread across the world. (2) How would the survivors know where each continent's zone is? If you're in Mexico, and the North American zone is in Canada, you're in a serious world of hurt. $\endgroup$
    – RonJohn
    Dec 5, 2016 at 23:06
  • $\begingroup$ @RonJohn I didn't say it was one zone. The logistics would be ridiculously complicated. To be sustainable there would be small communities in remote places. $\endgroup$
    – Snowlockk
    Dec 6, 2016 at 7:17
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I'd suggest fire pits. Fast and possible. Yes, most move away from the smoke and the populated areas, and make sure there are no bodies there. Burying them without chemicals or coffins could indeed make the water bad.

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    $\begingroup$ to expand on your answer, natural sources of hot things (volcanoes, lava pits) could also be used. $\endgroup$
    – Jesse Cohoon
    Dec 5, 2016 at 13:58
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    $\begingroup$ @JesseCohoon : There aren't too many volcanoes or lava pits near NYC, Chicago, Bejing, Los Angeles, London, etc. $\endgroup$
    – RonJohn
    Dec 5, 2016 at 23:09
  • $\begingroup$ You need a massive amount of fuel to burn a body, a mass grave is fine, animals die by the millions every day without causing a hazard. bodies are not going to pollute the water table unless you do something stupid like tossing bodies in your reservoirs. $\endgroup$
    – John
    Dec 6, 2016 at 5:31
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Survivors would leave the population centers behind and let nature take its course. Scavengers could take care of the corpses in a couple years.

No centralized disposal effort would be sufficient given the numbers of dead relative to the number of survivors.

The most efficient way I can think of is heavy earth-moving equipment, mass graves and lye, but that might not be sufficient past the small town scale.

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The most efficient way won't be done.

The most efficient way to manage this is to find a region that had a relatively low pre-plague population density and that has the elements necessary to rebuild your population. Good farmland, access to clean water, etc. Move all of your survivors there, clean up what bodies are onsite, and move on with life.

By the time your population has recovered to a point that they need to expand, they can do so relatively easily into neighboring spaces, etc. By the time they reach a high-population-density area like a pre-fall city, natural decay will have solved the worst of your problems.

But that's a best case scenario that doesn't take into account the logistics or psychology/sociology of relocating all survivors in the midst of the most horrific possible event ever in human history.

Instead, you have chaos.

TL;DR: welcome to every post-apocalypse world found in history.

Some areas will have clumps of survivors. Maybe they work together and clear their immediate surroundings. Maybe they work separately and achieve the same goal. Or maybe they are too busy fighting for survival to do anything but clear the home they occupy.

Your best-case scenario is that people gravitate towards small towns, work out their differences with regards to self-governance, and eventually settle into a pattern where they form clean-up crews that go house-to-house, disposing of bodies and spoiled foods, releasing any surviving pets trapped inside, turning off breakers, etc., so that the houses can be occupied later, when population expands due to "immigration" or birth rates.

If electricity can be restored to the town, they'd want to leave it shut off for each neighborhood until that neighborhood had been swept by clean-up crews, so ovens aren't left on or other electrical fire hazards don't destroy the town.

(See Stephen King's The Stand for a fairly good representation of this model.)

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Your question suggests the need for the 5% to clear up the 95% ... but why bother?

There are other things on your mind - food, water and security being the obvious. All you need enough space to be able to survive a month or so (time shamlessly taken from the other answers); but you don't need to clear everything up.

If for example London falls - you're not going to go to london and try to clean up all the bodies there, you're going to move out into a town at best where you have a few hundred corpses to clear rather than thousands.

This wouldn't even require any thought by someone in living at the time, because the question "How do I survive" does not have "dispose of every body" as an answer; thus would not even be considered as a task for completion.

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  • $\begingroup$ Can you imagine the number of flies "created" by 7 billion corpses? $\endgroup$
    – RonJohn
    Oct 10, 2017 at 16:10
  • $\begingroup$ @RonJohn yes - London would be uninhabitable; so you move out. There's no land there you can use to farm, so there's no sustainable food suply, and there's a large risk of infection. Why make a mountain of corpses and risk getting infected yourself, when you could relocate and make a molehill? $\endgroup$
    – UKMonkey
    Oct 10, 2017 at 16:21
  • $\begingroup$ The flies, rats, etc are going to move out of London looking for food. $\endgroup$
    – RonJohn
    Oct 10, 2017 at 16:24
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How you would get rid of the bodies would depend on your local environment and the rate at which they appear. Any disease that first causes sickness, gradually weakening the affected over a day or more would cause the sick to congregate at medical facilities, and as soon as these overfill, at home.

Its not realistic to assume all 95% who will eventually die will be dying over the course of a few days, more likely it will spread out over weeks, if not month. Even highly contagious diseases do not infect everyone on first exposure. Take the outbreaks of mostly harmless flu as an example, it usually lasts month, even in highly populated areas.

This means the majority of bodies will be immediately discovered, and as soon as the scale of the pandemic becomes obvious, authorities will work to deal with it. As the pandemic progresses, more and more people will die at home (medical facilities become overrun on the first few days). Even if 2-5% of the initial population would die per day, collecting the dead bodies (especially under martial law) is relatively manageable logistically. All you need is a truck and some people to go around a neighborhood to collect the dead. Most likely these will be accompanied by armed soldiers and not delivering dead bodies will be dealt with as a crime under martial law.

Once collected, the bodies can be disposed of by any means locally available: by burining in waste disposal facilities, mass graves or even by dumping in landfills. While 7 billion sounds much, in terms of weight and volume its not so much compared to the amount of waste we have to manage annually anyway. Its just a very busy year for the garbage movers.

At some point, when the death toll has climbed high enough, civilization will break down and organized disposal of the dead would come to a halt. Its hard to imagine at which percentage this would happen exactly, from a standpoint of pure work force, there is no reason why this couldn't work even until only the 5% ultimately surviving would remain. But realistically it would break down at some point, psychological effects of mass death on this scale are hard to imagine.

I'd say the amount of bodies isn't the major problem, the main problem is maintaining order and organization. As soon as the society falls back to savagery things really go downhill. The best chance of survival then is in rural areas, there are fewer people to begin with and more resources (food, water). Considering that there will have been a phase where the dead have been disposed of orderly, there wouldn't be too many corpses to deal with in rural areas.

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No one plauge kills all 95% of the population at the same time... It takes a while for the plague to be recognized, then to spread and finally burn out. You assume "rapidly spreading", which is very vague, but even so it may take months to get there.. So if you want to do it fast, go for "bio attack", with as many "Patients Zero" in as many international transportation hubs as possible. But it will still take weeks. Then there's the question of which season - warm months will increase both decomposition and removal of bodies by pests.

Civilization does not break suddenly, too. Initially there will be services to take care of the bodies - NYC has approx 0.002% death rate daily... It's quite possible to increase it by order of magnitude before healthcare/sanitation is overwhelmed after few weeks. So that's 0.5-1% right there taken care from start, more depending on various factors. It's quite a lot, actually.

Then society collapses, mass panic, evacuation jammed roads etc. In big cities rats, flying rats and other bugs take care of quite a lot of bodies rather fast. WOn't help survivors there - they will suffer secondary effect of that in all forms, i.e. rapidly spreading flesh-eating bacteria, all kinds of worms and insects feeding and reproducing at phenomenal rate.

Most of the survivors will be in rural and/or remote areas. So not much bodies to start with. Distance from cities will also prevent diseases to spread there.

I'd say you have to work some more on initial conditions of your Apocalypse...

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Even if deaths occur in a short period of time, it's not an overwhelming logistic problem if people remaining alive (and healthy) want to dispose the corpses. A 95% death rate means that each survivor has to deal with 19 corpses, and that doesn't seem an impossible task, even if a sizeable part of the survivors can't do it (elderly people, children and so). Furthermore, in such a sudden crisis, survivors are likely to be able to use excavators or other equipment to bury or cremate corpses.

The main problem would be to coordinate survivors for burial. In a 40 people village it's easy for the 2 survivors to agree to do the task of disposing the 38 remaining corpses, but if most of the 100.000 survivors of a 2.000.000 inhabitants city keep waiting for someone else to do the task of burying the 1.900.000 corpses, nobody will do and the survivors will need to flee the city.

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In Sugar Scars by Travis Norwood this problem was solved by government deception.

The government informed people that the virus was spread through air, and the only way to avoid infection was to seal your house with duct tape and stay indoors for a month. Thus, all the bodies are conveniently contained within sealed boxes. The lie is also believable enough that not many people need to know the truth.

You only need to cope with the bodies if you want to salvage resources from homes. Presumably you would prefer to take supplies from shops and workplaces.

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Just start making mass graves as soon as a noticeable amount of people died from it, say 10 to 15 percent. Or just start pouring them in the canyons spread around the world. As for the spreading to the living, well, start enslaving the already sick, unless they find a cure.

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    $\begingroup$ With a 95% mortality rate, even if you start with mass graves early, every survivor is, on average, got to personally dispose of 95/5 = 19 bodies. The OP doesn't describe any selective traits to the disease, so many of the survivors are going to be too old, young, weak, traumatized, or disabled to move their share, meaning the healthier people are going to be moving dozens of bodies. I'm not saying it can't be done, but you might want to describe how they'll deal with that kind of volume. Oh by the way, welcome to Worldbuilding.SE! :-) $\endgroup$
    – type_outcast
    Dec 7, 2016 at 23:05
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If your goal is to get rid of the bodies for story purposes let the diease do it for you.

This is a little convient for pure chance but there are several plant diseases which basicly liquify the plant fairly quickly. So you might be able to tailor your disease or a secondary infection to help clean up your cadaver problem.

I will add references if I find some

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Have your disease affect the minds of the dying: like lemmings they will flock to water (rivers and beaches) and die in it (drown). Problem 'solved'.

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