system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[The Walking Dead] Does the virus lower most people intelligence / makes them suicidal?

Now I've been watching the documentary of Rick lately and it becomes pretty clear that Walkers by itself are very easily beatable.  Rick woke up from a coma and minutes later he had figured out not only what a walker is but also how to do deal with it.  In the documentary largely untrained,  physically unfit and even children are able to kill dozens of walkers without much of a sweat. 

Now this fact stands in glaring conflict with the world of the walking dead were all military bases and police station got utterly destroyed by walkers. None of the million of service personal that died to walkers seemed to was able to deal with them despite it his skill set making him,  at least in theory,  much better suited to kill unhealthy. After a few soldiers turned and bitten other soldiers, the hundreds of remaining soldiers should have been able to figure out, that a) you have to get away from the walkers, that b) the walkers are dead (something that should have been clear after the first guy discharged his service weapon into the body of a walker and c) you need to shoot them in the head. 

This leads me to the only logical conclusion : in the majority of people the virus leads to a significant reduction of intelligence and deduction skills as well as alters their behavior to be much phrone to high risk behavior.  The survivors we see are immune to these effects to the virus (with many famous exceptions).  

Do we have any information to confirm my theory?  What do we know really about the virus?
gpt
I think they handled the initial zombie outbreaks quite easily. However, they probably didn't realize that everyone was infected. 

Their main losses came from random people dying and immediately turning into zombies. No barricade would be safe from that. If a soldier dies in his bunk while everyone is asleep? Congrats you now have a bunch of zombies. In the chaos it was unlikely that anyone would realize that *everyone* is already infected, and the only people who did found out too late, and decided to off themselves instead.

So the main problem here is not that the zombies aren't easily handled (in fact, much like DayZ, humans are the real threat after season 1), it's that zombies can ambush you or that anyone can become a zombie.