Yeah I know its way different methods. Sorry for being disingenuous. The point of my snarking was that google made a lot of noise about Google Flu but then quietly got rid of it when it didn't work. To me Googles research has a tendency to be more about headlines than actually solving problems.
No worries, Google does tend to do a good job of monopolizing attention in whatever they do and Epidemic Modeling is... complicated. Probably much more complicated than pretty much any other kind of modeling since people have the bad habit of thinking and acting in whatever way they want (sometimes with the explicit purpose of breaking your model :).
Now, if you want to see the real-world state-of-the-art epidemic modeling on a global scale, checkout GLEaM/GLEaMViz https://www.gleamviz.org/ (full disclaimer, in a previous life I was the lead developer).
And if you're interested in a basic intro, you can also checkout my (somewhat neglected) series of blog posts from the pandemic days: https://github.com/DataForScience/Epidemiology101 </ShamelessSelfPromotion>
