Zombie Travel Bug Dispersion Tracker

Many thanks to the Mercury Team for reporting in our absence, and for the dozens of folks (many of whom we sadly lost in the battle) who helped reclaim our original compound. We apologize for the intermittent reporting that has plagued our efforts, and are working with renewed vigor to bring you the latest and most accurate data we can on the spread the ZTB plague.

We’ve burned our dead, revamped the servers and are moving onward.

Since the Mercury Team reported on 30 OCT there have been 9 known ZTBs marked missing. There have been no reports on new ZTBs. we had 17376 sightings in 45 of the United States. Nevada, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia Maryland and Florida all had over 225 hits. Texas, New Hampshire, Ohio and New York all had better than 100 hits. The maps below may tell the story better.

There were 1566 sitings in 39 other countries around the world during the same reporting period. Here, Germany continues to be worst hit, followed by France, Finland, Belgium and Kenya. The upsurge f activity in Africa is most worrisome. Below are snapshots of activity of this reporting period in Europe and worldwide:

Stay safe out there folks. No telling what is in store for 2107….

As of 14 OCT 2016, the Maryland team had been incommunicado for at least 90 days. As a result, in accordance with contingency program seven, the Mercury Protocol has been invoked. Remote reporting from an undisclosed and less at-risk site commences with this broadcast. It should be noted that a thorough data-scrub has been conducted, and that all data roll-over systems functioned nominally; there has been no data lost as a result of this incident.

While every effort will be made to recover news and detail of the Maryland core team, we fear they have been lost.

Much has happened since the last report. Maryland reported 1798 hits before they went offline; Massachusetts reported 1445. The entire northeast region, from the tidewater states up to southern New England, suffered 6022 hits. There was a somewhat similar effect on the west coast, with 669 hits in California, and 225 in Washington; Ohio, Kansas and Florida were the other heavy hitters in the states. We had reports from all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico with a total of 9176 sightings.

Things are not much better to the north, with 876 hits in Canada. To the south, there was minimal activity in Mexico, Honduras, Peru and Brazil.

Europe continues to suffer greatly, with 1077 reports in the Balkan states, and 1168 reports in north central Europe including the UK. The northern tier did not do much better, although Sweden had significantly less activity than Norway or Finland. Finland was a real hotspot with 1425 reports.

There were new outbreaks in central Africa, with Rwanda, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo submitting their first reported cases. There were a number of other new places that reported sightings as well; everything listed below Iceland on the dispersion map page (underneath the map) was new this period.

Southeast Asia featured new areas affected as well: Malaysia and the Philippines. Australia had some significant activity with 223 hits.

Overall there were 14,416 sightings around the world in 56 countries. 218 of the 353 known ZTBs were sighted during this period. 12 were reported missing.

Stay safe out there.

There were a whopping 1887 reports in Colorado since our last update on 01 July. 43 in Wyoming, 205 in Kansas, 77 in Nebraska, and 41 in South Dakota. The western plains and Denver area are a blood bath. We recommend you stay clear. The northeast corridor ou here on the east edge of the con intent did not fare much better, with heavy activity in Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts. That area had 1330 reports overall.

In Europe, the major Portugese activity seems to have moved into the Madrid, Spain area, and active ZTBs from Germany and France have heavily infected Switzerland and Austria. Greece and the UK showed upticks in activity, and we had our first reports from Iceland and Tenerife. Quite disturbing that these isolated islands are being affected. Activity in southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand was relatively light this time around.

Be careful out there….

As most of you know by now (and as is documented elsewhere on this site) the zombie plague originated at a research facility in suburban Maryland. Maryland has been a hotspot ever since, and the plague has slowly spread up the northeast corridor into New Jersey, New York and New England. Hotspots have popped up elsewhere around the world as well, as geocachers travel to find hides, and they take the plague with them. The trends we have been following outside of North America have had the expected progress in the week or so since the last report. Northern and central Europe continue to show significant activity, especially in Norway, Finland, Sweden and Germany. Belgium and France have calmed down a bit, but are still quite active, as is Portugal. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia are continuing to see some activity as well. In Asia, the slow increase in activity is still going on, with Okinawa in the limelight.

We have long feared a migratory spread out of Maryland to the west, and with this week’s analysis, we fear it has finally begun. Increased activity in Virginia we have long been expecting, but the explosion of activity going westward that we see in this week’s reports, is terribly disheartening. The below screen capture, from one of the recent analysis tools we have had under development shows it best:

You can see a steady march of reported sightings (circles with numbers) from Maryland towards Colorado, and an explosion of activity in Colorado. Not clear why Missouri was spared, and it may just be a data anomaly, but we got nor reports on sightings there this week. We think trend is directly attributable to increased geocaching activity related to Geowoodstock XIV, which is being held in Denver, Colorado this coming Sunday. We hope we are wrong, but we suspect next week’s report will feature a significant increase in activity in Colorado.

We would also note that over the past month or so we have received numerous reports on previously unknown zombie travel bugs; in the last week alone ten new ZTBs (Patients 342-352) have been reported.

So. The population of infected cachers is increasing, and the plague is spreading. Same old news I guess. Bummer. What will the future hold?

Well, we hope. Things are slowly returning to normal here. To be honest, the numbers in this week’s report are a little sketchy. There was really more activity than we will show here, but we ran and re-ran the update protocols numerous times over the last week as we brought servers and back-ups back on line, so really these numbers more likely demonstrate the activity just since the weekend.

A few items of note:

– Intermittent reports of new ZTBs from over the last few weeks have been collated, and all are now represented on the site. We are up to 342 individual cachers turned zombie now, and vast areas of the planet have been affected. If it seems like there has been a surge there has. Ever since the second wave, the numbers just seem to keep growing.

– We have fielded a few questions about ZTB discovery. You should know that we treat discovery reports as rumor. Only verified drop, retrieval or visit logs count against the numbers, as these logs have verifiable geolocation data associated with them. Discovery and grab logs do not have geolocation data associated, so we can’t verify the location of the ZTB through them.

Here’s this week’s gouge:

We had reports on 112 of 342 ZTBs, in 31 states and 15 countries. 227 reports in the U.S., and 71 reports overseas. Hot spots included the U.S mid-Atlantic coast, Virginia, California and Florida here, and Canada and Germany overseas. We did have one report each from Alaska, Hawaii and South Africa, and one report in New Zealand.

Geowoodstock is coming up in Denver, Colorado in a couple of weeks, and we’ve heard rumors of an imminent outbreak there, but have yet to receive any confirmed reports. Be careful out there!

We’ve retaken the bunker! There are, of course, now days of clean-up, disposal, re-stock and defensive reinforcement. We are confident that we can get the compound into a better state, but it may take a bit.

In the eleven days since we last updated, there have been 838 sitings reported in the United States, in 43 different states. There were an additional 473 sightings reported abroad, in 43 countries. Hotspots in CONUS were Maryland, New Jersey, New York, but most especially, Kentucky. Louisville is getting hammered. Florida, California and Virginia continue too show increasing activity.

Germany was the heavy hitter abroad, followed by Canada, Portugal, the Netherlands and Sweden. Guatemala and Belize both had there first reported sitings, as did Puerto Rico and Estonia; we wish those localities all the best as they deal with this infection, it is difficult to deal with to say the least. We also had a siting in Lichtenstein, something we don’t see very often.

Stay safe!

We have not updated the site since April 24th. Our apologies, but the bunker was once again over run, and this time we had to evacuate completely. If you are seeing anything post here, it is currently being done by remote. We left the servers up and running, with a reliable underground power line, so with any luck you will see this. There is a new assault planned soon, we are just scrounging more ammo and personnel, as we lost a few more, and expended a lot of ammo, and were scattered for awhile. You may see intermittent outages on parts of the site, but we are working overtime to get it up an running 100%. Any help you can send to Maryland would be of enormous value.

So enough about us, here’s what has been happening elsewhere. Since the last update, we’ve had reports from all states except North Dakota. There were 2038 hits in the Unites States the bulk of which (1394) were in the northeast and mid-Atlantic states. Maryland had 374 alone, and there were also 198min New Jersey, 125 in Virginia (which is finally starting to feel the pain), 91 in Pennsylvania and 55 in New York. Other areas of the country hard it were Kentucky, Florida, Utah and California. There has been a significant upsurge in activity in the San Francisco Bay area. There were 853 sightings overseas, about half of which were in a polygon that ranges from the Iberian peninsula up through France and Germany into the Nordic countries. We also saw an ongoing incrust in activity in Asia, with a significant number of hits in China, Singapore, Thailand, Japan South Korea and Taiwan. With 19 new reports in Argentina, and 75 between Australia and New Zealand, the worldwide spread continues to grow unabated.

We had reports on 46% (117) of known active ZTBs in the last 11 days, in 15 states and 14 countries. !461 hits here in the states, 212 hits overseas, for a total of 1673. That’s almost double what we had the last reporting period. Activity in northern Norway seems to be on the rise, we had normal levels in Germany and Portugal, and a spike in Hungary. New Jersey and Maryland both saw offer 500 hits, and New England continues to suffer greatly as well. Keep your eyes and ears open out there!