In an all-out breakdown of society 50%-70% of the US population would be dead in ~90-120 days.
1. Lack of clean water would be the number one killer
2. Everyone on daily medication would be next
Lots of people would die just because of all the dead people. Who's going to police the bodies?
After that your locale and access to resources might start to play a factor in your survival.
Clean water will be a big problem for sure, but I disagree with your time scale. Maybe in phoenix and Vegas but not in most cities. We can drink dirty water or rain water as long as Dysentery or Cholera does not take hold. It will inevitably but it will take some time.
Disease will take longer than 120 days. Civil war battle fields were highly polluted due to dead bodies, but disease was able to be managed. True smaller scale but dead bodies just by themselves are not a problem.
You just take away electricity and people will start dying within a month. How many people rely on modern medicine just to survive? If it's summer people will die of heat, winter people will die of cold. It will be orders of magnitude worse than the depression. People were tough back then and already had the basic systems in place to survive off grid. Now you take away a teenager's phone and they're suicidal within days.
Even though folks think they would die of heat they won't. Although you have to use your head about heat. I hate heat but it won't even kill me. How do you die of average cold? I mean don't folks have clothes. Blankets etc... you put insulation on.
Its weird to me that not every single house wouldn't have a wood stove or at least fireplace. Even if you never use it.
As to water, in urban places I could see the issue. Rural won't matter. And a gallon of bleach goes a long way to sterilize lots of water if you can't boil it... I would imagine most houses have a couple of gallons of bleach somewhere.
A quick search on just TX showed 1.1 million licensed hunters and an estimated 1.5 mill hogs. If each hunter tried to shoot just 2, they'd be out of hogs. Of course many of the hogs would be inedible.
Why indelible?
Anyway the questions is could we? We could easily eat no beef rest of our lives.
Are there enough for the masses ? Nope. But then again our land here and up north is big enough to feed more than us so we just manage it as needed.
Hopefully if it ever got bad 2 things would happen. We could get up north where very few if any have the balls to go and survive there just fine. And lots of people would no longer exist. That would be the biggest plus for the country as its well overpopulated and worse every day.
Alaska is an interesting case. The weather and the terrain will keep the feral mobs from your door for sure, BUT ... most modern bush Alaskans are still tethered to the modern supply chain. It takes a very hardy individual to survive in the Alaska bush with out modern tech help of some kind. Transportation to and from game alone is a major obstacle there even if you live remote. How many people paddle to and from their moose hunt.
The fact that almost no one I know in AK doesn't have 6 plus months of food stashed for starters. Is. a starter. There are other issues in play in AK that make you be prepared.
Yup some have to travel to hunt. We have caribou, bison, moose, etc.. through our yard..I don't know how long they would last... but they will last some since not many folks and many live off a moose a year etc... anyway.
Travel isn't that big of a deal, it just takes time. Only issue we would have is foot travel to fishable waters but I can live without fish if need be. Knowing there are horses in the area I suspect we could figure that out.
Off the top of my head supply chains are nice. But there is very little in need if it got right down to it. A large stash of salt and pepper and flour and sugar and yeast and life won't be very bad. Sourdough starter lives a long time. Doesn't hurt flour wise that we are in a barley farming area and I suppose a lot of that or enough of that would continue to grow and mill.
Would be a good time to go dig up so to speak, some of the gold in the hills too likely.
The fact you mention transportation as an issue, means it will be for everyone so that keeps us only basically worried about us
I couldn't think of a better place to live the rest of my days having no clue what the outside world is doing.
If we got stuck in TX it would be much much worse and would have to deal with a lot of people showing up for some amount of time. As long as the golden bb stays away we can live off the land we have.
