Welcome to Respiratory Outlook 2023/24: developing forecasts on the trajectories of influenza, COVID-19, and RSV for the 2023/24 respiratory disease season. This initiative builds on Metaculus’s previous contributions to the public health ecosystem while advancing the integration of new data science and hybrid intelligence techniques.
This program is designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of crowd forecasting in real-time decision-making, highlighting how it can aid public health officials in responding to ongoing epidemiological changes and better anticipating future conditions.
We greatly appreciate the forecasting community’s insights and expertise in this important public health initiative. Your predictions can help refine epidemiological models and support a more effective public health response this respiratory disease season.
This project is supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2348262. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this project are those of Metaculus and our forecasters, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Structure
This initiative features questions on the trajectories and peaks of COVID-19, influenza, and RSV, as well as relevant questions on vaccine uptake and the potential for new variants. New sub-questions open every two weeks.
- Trajectory questions focus on hospitalization levels at two week intervals for each disease.
- Peak questions focus on the magnitude and timing of peak hospitalization rates for each disease, as well as the combined burden.
All questions close by the end of May, 2024, but the end date is July 1, 2025, as some questions do not resolve until the publication of studies analyzing the 2023-24 respiratory disease season.
The Community Prediction is hidden for three days after question launch. However, forecasts during this period receive no additional coverage weight. Learn more about scoring.
Eight Metaculus Pro Forecasters are participating and will share their predictions and rationales with the community.
Federal rules prohibit us from offering a prize pool. However, we hope this constraint helps to underscore the importance of the initiative, and we do intend to recognize top forecasters for their valuable contributions.