His other stories, sure. But not in WotW. The common cold thing just struck me as a tidy way to end the story, and the irony of it.

The story is an allegory about the evils of colonialism, told from the perspective of the colonized (in progress). HG Wells is on the record about that.

The common cold thing is a direct reference to what happened to European explorers when they first encountered syphilis in North America.