Interesting question.
Because smallpox has not been an issue for some decades, there is no knowing how advances in medical care and treatment of viral illnesses would affect the outcome of smallpox cases. How much would it alleviate the symptoms, prevent scarring, lower the mortality rate, etc.
Of course, that would be very dependent on who got the medical care, or rather to whom it was rationed out to.
I know in my case, with my history of eczema, I’d be a goner. Smallpox is supposedly very serious to people with a history of eczema, and because of that, they have historically been advised to not even get the vaccine because of the potential of a very serious reaction to even that. I never got the smallpox vaccine by my doctor’s recommendation, but he did tell my mom, that if it ever went around, risks notwithstanding, I would need to be one of the first to get it, because the smallpox would be fatal for me for sure.
I was born in 1950. At that time there had been an outbreak of smallpox. I was only a few months old. The pediatrician told my mother my chance of surviving the disease would be very small. My mother and father,after much deliberation, elected to have me vaccinated. The vaccine did not take. (No scar was left.) The doctor felt I needed another dose and so I was vaccinated a second time. Still no scarring. He researched reasons why this would happen and discovered that one person in a thousand has a truly “natural immunity” that prevents them from ever getting the disease. Those persons CANNOT get smallpox. As proof, I was required to recieve a vaccination again when I visited Israel during the early 1970’s and had the same results.