I’m writing most of the official lore right now. That 99% figure hasn’t been canon for a very, very long time, since it doesn’t reflect the game world at all. The current estimate is about 1/1000 to 1/10,000 people surviving by game start, and a huge number more are dead by the end of first winter (canon within the design doc). The largest surviving faction is about 250 people within the game region for good reason.
And New England was no harder hit than anywhere else. That’s pretty clear in the design doc too (again, I know because I wrote those sections).
You’ve got the people working most closely with the lore and span of the game telling you the projected outcome. You can headcanon it all you like I guess, but that’s never going to be reflected in the lore. The blob has already infected everyone and everything on our planet, killed all but a tiny portion of us, and moved its attention on to other things. Those humans remaining are fighting each other as much as the zombies, earth is dying, and (again, canonically) the zombies will continue to advance in power until the earth is dead.
Dark Days Ahead, not “humans are cool and tougher than anything else in the multiverse”.
