I find this a pretty weak excuse for a high-impact epidemiological model like this. Universities are full of the brightest people you will find anywhere in society, and most universities have faculties and courses in computer science and/or software engineering. How about enforcing multi-disciplinary efforts, having computer science students work with microbiologists, and vice versa? Exchange programs between universities that specialize in one or the other?

University graduates need to do internships and a thesis anyway, so in terms of 'funding' you could argue they are basically 'free' in terms of assigning them to multi-disciplinary research.

I know I would have been delighted if someone at my university had offered me an interesting multi-disciplinary microbiology project when I was studying computer science. Instead we mostly just got boring run-of-the-mill exercises in parroting established computer-science theory...