Yes. Basically everything you hear about like flattening the curve, social distancing, all of it is informed by variations on the classic SIR model of epidemic

Yes. Basically everything you hear about like flattening the curve, social distancing, all of it is informed by variations on the classic SIR model of epidemic propagation. The modelling most often goes wrong either when people do something bizarrely stupid that the modellers didn't think of, like farmers in the UK foot and mouth disease epidemic moving animals at night to farms that had been declared clean in order to avoid having them destroyed, or lack of good numbers to go into the model in the absence of adequate testing.