system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[PotA reboot] How many humans actually died from the virus?

There are passing mentions in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to the virus and its toll on humanity. One character says it wiped out half the planet. 

I assume this is just rhetoric, because losing half the world population would still leave 3.5 *billion* people. That's a hell of a lot of people! Humans would still outnumber apes by a margin of a thousand to one!

That would leave over *2 million* people in the San Francisco metro area alone. That's more people than there are great apes *in the entire world*.

Please help me with these numbers! There must be hope for ape kind!
gpt
The simian flu spread almost universally, and initial exposure causes a 90 percent death rate. Within a few years, the human population went from 7 billion to 700 million. 

But that wasn't the end of the madness. The speed with which simian flu incapacitates and kills (you're severely ill within two days, basically bed-bound within five, and close to death within a week) left entire cities - entire *nations* - without any functioning infrastructure. The production and distribution of the most vital necessities - food, fuel, medicine - ground to a halt. Nuclear power plants went critical. Dams overflowed and collapsed. Fires raged out of control. 

Secondary plagues swept the globe - typhus and dysentery mostly, as billions of corpses rotted and their filth swept into untreated reservoirs from which desperate survivors drank. The rats and cockroaches feasted, and they spread unholy amounts of disease as they multiplied out of control (especially in the first winter, as their exploding numbers were drawn to the few flickering campfires of the survivors for warmth). 

Worse than all of this was what was left of humanity. Few were able to maintain their sanity in the face of this madness. A father who'd watched his family die, a doctor that walked a hospital full of the bloated dead, a child who ate his dead brother; how many of them could walk past an abandoned gun without thinking of the easy way out? How many could go on living, let alone think of a better future? And even if you could dream of a tomorrow, the weed-strewn roads are full of those who want nothing more than to howl and drink in the last guttering flames. Rape, murder, genocide, even a few small nuclear exchanges among the gasping, hating remnants of a few second-string militaries: they did their part.

Perhaps a million humans remain in communities like San Francisco, bent on rebuilding and in contact with other flickering flames of civilization, but transmissions from Asia and Europe no longer come over the shortwave: half of the world is gone, forever. There are other remnants out in the wilderness, and perhaps some even in the vast radioactive belt of the Middle East and India; survivalists, ex-military war bands, the lucky or unlucky few, but their numbers dwindle almost day by day.