The COVID-19 pandemic has been called “a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco” (Ioannides, 2020), while the editor of the Lancet has declared that “the handling of the COVID-19 crisis in the UK is the most serious science policy failure in a generation” (Horton, 2020). At the heart of the science policy is mathematical modelling, a scientific activity once reserved for mathematicians, epidemiologists …