Interesting. There was an opinion piece at nytimes.com on 2/28/20 about going medieval on the COVID-19 virus:
Quarantines and restrictive measures served a purpose in the old days. They can now, too.
www.nytimes.com
I doubt that the entire country could successfully go full medieval at this stage.
Drifting off topic, I ran across this article at the CDC website about the reconstruction of the 1918 virus:
The complete story reflecting on the groundbreaking work that has led to global efforts to prepare for future pandemic threats.
www.cdc.gov
Testing done using genetically altered versions of the 1918 virus showed why it was so lethal:
"Dr. Tumpey determined that the HA and PB1 virus genes of the virus played particularly important roles in its infectiousness and severity. However, as his experiments involving recombinant flu viruses with some but not all of the 1918 virus’s genes showed, it was not any single component of the 1918 virus but instead the unique combination of all of its genes together that made it so particularly dangerous."
It looks like the 1918 virus had an exceptionally unfortunate (from the perspective of us humans) combination of genes.