The advice may sound good, but it clearly did not work.
> A gut punch of a paragraph in a 2010 vintage fantasy novel re: plague response:
> They were intelligently planned procedures, quickly and efficiently carried out, by men who knew what they were doing. They'd never worked in the past, and this time was no exception.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/how-smallpox-devastated...
They did not have time for one to appear.