Of course, the corporate media and covert PR fronts have been attacking mathematical modelling for decades as a means to discredit climate science. The public were primed to distrust models. But remember that the planet Neptune was discovered through primitive mathematical modelling.
Modelling doesn’t affect underlying facts; greenhouse gases trap heat, and infections spread. But we want to know more than that; how will the world change with additional heat? How fast will a given infection spread? You can attempt a static calculation but you can only extrapolate so far without gross changes to your initial assumptions; a warmer world has different cloud cover, a more widespread outbreak has access to different population centres. This is where models become useful, running the same calculation over and over again, each run’s output being the next run’s input. This also makes models susceptible to accelerating divergence from reality, but it’s a modeller’s job to understand and allow for this, just as it’s a doctor’s job to understand symptoms from more than one cause, and interactions between drugs.