So I'm a little confused about how the Infected work in the Pandemic scenario.

When you convert stress to trauma and some of that stress is damage from an infected, you are "awarded" the "infection trauma". It says you have to spend a day trying to heal it. If you fail, you get another infection trauma.

So what happens when you fail? Do you just get two trauma and not turn to zombies? It seems on the timeline that it takes about 1 hour for the symptoms to arise and about 4-5 hours before you turn. However, does this factor into PCs turning. Do they only turn when PCs die?

Do you think the timing of the stress to trauma should matter in this case? When you start treating the infection I think should matter.

Any opinion would be helpful. It just seems players don't turn to infected in this scenario, which is a total buzz kill for me.

It says under the "infected" monster that failing the check grants an additional infection Trauma. The way I would do probably it (we haven't done that one yet, because my group are babies about "fast" zombies), would be when they convert the stress to a trauma, I'd tell them it would be an "infected" wound. I'd also probably roll my own vitality check for them, and not give them the results. Thus, the players would have to decide how to proceed. If the check had passed, they'd have nothing to worry about (but wouldn't know that). If it failed, a few in-game hours later, they'd start experiencing symptoms. If left unattended, they'd turn a few hours after that and their "health" would be whatever health they had left until death prior to turning.

Sounds very close to how we do it too. Keeping the Infection roll a secret is great drama. Our group killed an NPC that wasn't actually infected. No way for them to know really but I was like "dang!"

We've been running the "slow" zombies one and recently had to deal with "infection".

Someone was "bit" but survived the infection. Luckily for him, it's the scenario where everyone is infected, so he's just been fighting off the base "infection". However, I forced him to keep the "bite" as a permanent trauma even though he didn't die from in, because it'll have affects in the future. Also, the only reason he didn't die this time, was that it happened literally right outside the hospital the military was using as a base and he got instant treatment (he was leading a patrol outside and on the way back they were clearing the zeds outside the hospital and he got unlucky).