by Tonesta78
So the first, unhelpful, answer is don't have a first turn epidemic!
We didn't have the same problem - we used saboteur and I guess had a bunch of back-to-back-to-back Hollow Men Gather cards, but one thought I had.....
......if you have three hollow men in a city, can you not still move another Hollow Man there using disinformation? If that city doesn't have a shelter, it will obviously drop the population but should also allow you to take a Hollow Man figure off the board? Crashing a city's population with Hollow Men ain't ideal, but it's better than losing the game!
And given that I suspect you were pretty unlucky with HMG distribution in the first game - and still almost won - you'd probably only need to do the above a handful of times to be sure of avoiding that issue.