Per your point, it sounds like the field you work in involves some kind of stochastic modeling, thus generating imperfect but nevertheless helpful outputs.
Biological models are far more problematic beyond the reasons you cited. Simply put- nature is complex beyond our wildest imaginations.
The reason global warming models will always fail is that it’s not just the physics of weather, but the biological effects of countless living plants and animals, the holistic effect of all nature, as it were, on the climate. The sheer number of variables, much less how to correctly weight them, is beyond our present scientific understanding.
So to me, the Wuhan models have far more dissimilarities than similarities to hurricane tracking models where biological agents are not significant.
Some simple examples ...
1. Motor vehicle crashes. The physics of every motor vehicle crash is unique, and the reaction of a human body to an impact in a crash will vary wildly. Fatality rates on a highway can also be influenced by things like EMT response time, underlying medical issues for victims, etc. And yet that doesn't stop me (in my profession) from using models to make predictions about the costs and benefits of highway projects where roadway geometry is changed, speed limits are raised or lowered, or other changes are made in the design and operation of a highway.
2. Hospital capacity forecasts. This type of modeling is done all over the place. In general terms, a population in a region will have X hospital beds for each 10,000 people. This can be divided even further into subsets like X1 (emergency room capacity), X2 (top-level trauma center capacity), X3 (infectious disease handling), X4 (cardiovascular treatment capacity), X5 (orthopedic treatment capacity), X6 (neurosurgery capacity), etc., etc. There are tremendous variations among different populations that will drive inaccuracies in this type of modeling, but that doesn't stop the medical industry and public health officials from using this approach to forecast changing health facility needs over time.
Sobering note here ... I am aware of at least one state government that uses third grade reading test scores as a primary variable in forecasting prison cell needs ten years down the road. Think of all the things that can change in ten years with human beings ... and yet the reading test scores of a large group of 8 year-old kids turns out to be a very good indicator of felony crimes committed by 18 year-olds a decade later.
My sense here is that the wide (effectively unlimited) range of variables in biological modeling presents less of a challenge than the SPEED at which these models must be re-calibrated in many circumstances. A viral outbreak is a classic example of this. This is not like tracking lung cancer rates and tobacco use over years and decades. It's more like trying to model the structural damage in a building while it's burning to the ground in a matter of minutes or hours.