You don't appear to know much about the history of this program, as you keep defending it on the basis it was written quickly - and that the alternative is no m

You don't appear to know much about the history of this program, as you keep defending it on the basis it was written quickly - and that the alternative is no modelling. It started being developed in 2007. It's by now over a decade old, with a lot of work done in 2014. This program wasn't written quickly, it was re-parameterised with a few values for COVID and otherwise thinks it's simulating the flu. Some other pieces of code date back multiple decades. You also appear to think that "limited resources" is a valid excuse. The UK science budget is over 8 billion pounds. Universities there churn out a large number of papers. The funding is there if they wanted to do less work but of higher quality, yet they don't. And finally, just to make that clear: yes, saying "We don't have a reliable model for you" is an entirely valid thing to say to a government. You seem to think even low quality simulations are better than none. Humanity has been fighting disease for thousands of years without bug-ridden 15,000 LOC C programs to "help" us. Not having an academic model is a completely reasonable position to be in. In particular there's a lot of evidence this particular model has already killed a lot of people: it predicted a surge in hospital needs that never happened. In anticipation of this surge a lot of elderly patients that had tested positive for COVID were discharged back into care homes, because the hospitals thought they'd need the beds within days. Those elderly people then infected the others in the care homes, causing the death rate to go up. If there had been no model, there'd have been no panic-induced mass discharge, patients would have been kept in wards until they were fully recovered and the virus wouldn't have been flushed straight into the populations of the most vulnerable. Outcomes could have been much better as a result.