Need advice for Pandemic Legacy with 2 players

My SO and I actually got a second copy of season 1 and played partway through a second run. Our first run was 2p, second run was 2 characters each. The second run was much more difficult; we wound up giving up on it after the map just got too ruined to have much chance of winning many of the subsequent games.

The main problems in 4p are the same as in vanilla Pandemic. First, each of your hands separately is very small, so you are more pressured to exchange cards than in lower counts. Second, each character separately is very unresponsive to the situation on the map. If you're already arranged just perfectly for the infection deck that you're currently cycling through, then you can usually clean house (because you spend few actions/cards moving and more on actually achieving stuff). But getting arranged that perfectly before things are already collapsing is sometimes hard.

There are some very vague mechanical spoilers in the following paragraph.

There are also some legacy-related issues. You don't get more upgrades in higher counts, so your character upgrades get diluted. You also tend to get scars more easily, simply because there is more chance for bad things to happen where you are located when you're stuck there for an extended period.

/r/boardgames Thread