Well put.

A 'predictive model' should say 'if you do X then you will end up with Y' - and the X cannot be adjusting some number. The X has to be stuff like 'building ETU's in West Africa', or 'canceling all flights',... A predictive model should be able to say 'don't bother canceling flights, it's no use - instead do this...'.

Note: I'm going to be teaching a course in Erlang programming next month where the homework assignment is epidemic modeling - 100K's of concurrent processes moving around, getting exposed to each other - that sort of stuff. Rather ambitious, but I feel it's a good use case for Erlang - a pandemic is a 'viral' chat application.