Kirkman has also openly talked about the direction of the show after Carl's death, so he may have made the open-ended comment about Carl "may" survive but in the next breath he talked about the impact of Carl's death to the story. ........"Carl is still very much alive in
The Walking Dead comic on which the show is based, with many theorizing that Rick may be killed off at some point with his son taking over. But that now won’t take place on the TV adaptation.
TWD comic creator (and show EP)
Robert Kirkman defended the move to EW and promised that there won’t be as much story reworking because of Carl’s death as people think. “There are big, huge stories coming up that you might think will be massively altered because of the absence of Carl,” says Kirkman. “But we have known these story lines have been coming for years. There are plans in place to make it all work. The loss of Carl doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to be losing big swaths of the comic book story. It means that there will be some differences to them.”.........
http://ew.com/tv/2018/01/17/walking-dead-norman-reedus-chandler-riggs-carl/