The sudden onset of the plague made the situation even more complicated. If it was just confined to the South African region, it would be manageable, but if it spread to the entire African Continent, Franz would be devastated.
There was no way around it, a colony was a colony. Despite Austria's operations on the African Continent for over a decade, it still couldn't change the reality of underdeveloped medical conditions.
Don't look at the current number of infections as being small; the high mortality rate was the real concern. Many patients didn't even know what hit them before they met their maker.
Franz, too, was blindsided; if he had looked closely at the data, he would have understood why the mortality rate was so high.
The group with the most infections was the cannon fodder army because of their lack of sanitation and effective treatment, which naturally resulted in a high death rate.
