Chapter 46-2: Under Pressure

[FenixArc]

With a few people mentioning spores/fungus it got me thinking about how Cordyceps works, in real life but more importantly in The Last of Us. In real life, at least one strain of it infects ants and mind controls them for the purpose of infecting even more ants. Interestingly this ties in nicely with theories from earlier in the series that the zombies behave like an ant colony. In the game, people are infected by spores or bites from other infected. After the fungus runs its course, the infected body dies and releases more spores to continue the cycle, perhaps not unlike what is happening in Tanya's morgue.

One of the key elements we are still missing here is how the outbreak started, and in multiple places. If there were already lots of bodies rotting under ground zero, how did they get there, how were they already infected, and how did it happen on other continents?