This is great, thanks. I do agree with almost everything you said.
I particularly like the idea of turn based. Initially I was going to reply no to that one point, my reasoning was that the idea of it being “continuous time” was to put pressure on the discussions about what actions to create in the game (e.g. government aid). But after trying to justify that in my comment I realized that it would actually better to slow it down to allow more thorough discussion. Thank you for making me think through it a little more.
There are actually many more variables than appear in this very small game and most are not obvious without better hints. It was only when watching IrishJohnGaming (check his twitch stream) playing the game I realized I’d missed the UI part to show the description of each upgrade. Doh!
So you have things like population density will impact the rate of infection. So taking actions that bring people in might give you more money but will also increase the rate of infection, unless you also encourage people to move out to the suburbs. This would be more obvious with more help text (again, doh!) and some graphical feedback as to what is happening in the town. Which is also in your feedback.
Thanks for taking the time to play, rate and most importantly give feedback.