Welcome to the Virginia Lightning Round Tournament! Since March 2020, Metaculus has been providing forecasting and modeling resources to public health professionals and public policy experts as they have navigated critical decisions about COVID-19 interventions in communities around the world. And since April 2021, we have been engaged in COVID-19 forecasting to support the decision-making of the Virginia Department of Health to help map out the trajectory of COVID-19 in Virginia.

Multiple modeling teams are also forecasting the trajectory of COVID-19 in Virginia. We are now partnering with them to ask questions that might improve their models and thus contribute to an overall better understanding of the future of COVID-19 in Virginia. The lightning round structure of this tournament enables rapid feedback on which iterations of different input questions might be most useful. Some of the questions under consideration:

• What will be the 7-day moving average of the percentage of people wearing masks in Virginia on 21 August?
• What will be the percentage of the population that will indicate they are "vaccine accepting" in Virginia on 21 August?
• What will be the case-to-hospitalization rate in Virginia on 21 August?
• How many of Virginia's 35 local health districts will be described as being "in surge" in UVA modeling slides dated 20 August?

This Tournament will directly address these key scientific and policy questions by aggregating knowledge from many experts and forecasters.

The tournament will run until 5 September, with four weekly rounds with 4-8 questions that are open Wednesday 8AM ET — Sunday 8AM ET. There are two types of questions, with calibration questions forming the bulk of questions asked:

• Calibration Questions: these close before the end date of the tournament, and are used to rank you in the tournament
• Long-term Questions: in order to probe far into the future, and build the Metaculus data set on predictions, we are including a number of far-reaching questions.

Week 1 of the tournament begins on 11 August at 8AM ET and closes on 15 August at 8AM ET, with many questions closing and resolving soon. Week 2 begins on 18 August at 8AM ET!

Thank you for your contributions to this initiative, and as always, Happy Predicting!