Yes it does change the ballgame.
This may turn out to be a mild outbreak (we can hope).
I guess a couple of things should be kept in mind however.
First, as I recall, the 1918 pandemic hit mostly young healthy adults, not infants or old people.
Second, as I recall, that pandemic actually hit in (at least) three waves. The first wave was mild enough that it took some retrospective analysis to see it. The second and third waves were the ones that caused most of the ~40 million deaths.
Let’s hope that history does not repeat itself.
(The close proximity of soldiers during WWI didn’t help either).
“(The close proximity of soldiers during WWI didn’t help either).”
There were plenty of deaths among previous healthy citizens not even close to a fort, including an uncle age 25 and his 22 year old wife, whom I never got to meet. They never left America and died in their hometown in the second wave.