Bear in mind: this is the first book to describe a post-apocalyptic future without Morlocks and Eloi in it. Gasoline was a petroleum distillate with tetraethyl lead, not the postmodern witches' brew we have these days and power generation was a lot less optimized and therefore more stable. When the book was written in 1949, "gasoline" was a newer technology than "fax machines" are today. Shit, when that book was written, fax machines were fifteen years in the future. Now? Sure, we've got a popular culture sheep-dipped into Dark Tower and Walking Dead and Road Warrior and every other postapocalyptic tale I'm forgetting but Patient Zero is that 70-year-old book that you're quibbling science over. I think my only real quibble with it is that the author thinks some things will last a lot longer than they really would.
I stand corrected on my minor quibbles. Even then, they don't detract from the book. In all honesty, I think it's a lot more fun because it doesn't have ghouls, or raiders, or crazy mutated animals, or oppressive governments, or whatever other tropes you can think of. Those things are all cool ideas, but they're over used and often not always that well executed. When one of your biggest sources of conflicts in the novel is a community's overall lax attitude, it's pretty refreshing.