Welcome to the Real-Time Pandemic Decision Making Tournament! This is a follow-on to the recently completed and highly successful Virginia Lightning Round Tournament. This tournament will consist of COVID-19 related questions written in conjunction with the University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute to support decision-making at the Virginia Department of Health.

Forecasters will be asked questions on case numbers, vaccination rates, booster uptake, and other key indicators important to decision-makers. Forecasts will be used to help determine which scenarios are more likely to play out and will serve as an additional input for computational modeling and policy decisions in the state of Virginia.

Our plan is to launch new rounds of 8 to 10 questions approximately every 3 weeks with all forecasting ending by May 31, 2022. The intent is for all questions in a round to close before the next round opens, so that the maximum open period of a question is 3 weeks.

This tournament will be one of the first to use the new Metaculus Tournament Scoring System. This means that forecasters will not be able to see the community median for the first few days after a question opens. (If you’ve read the explanation above: We plan to set c_weight = 100%, so a forecaster’s entire coverage is determined by their participation during the hidden period.) We will always announce how questions will be scored when they are launched, so you will know if we decide to change anything as the tournament progresses.

We may adjust the exact question parameters as we learn more about what works best. Our goal is to reward forecasting skill and we hope that forecasters find the new system to be more motivating! We anticipate this will lead to even more accurate forecasts, thereby helping to better inform real-time pandemic decision making.

Thank you for your contributions to this initiative. Happy Forecasting!