### Round 9 Announcement
[The 9th and final round of the Real-Time Pandemic Decision Making Tournament is open](https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/realtimepandemic/?order_by=-publish_time&project=1216&status=accepted). Predict COVID-19 case count highs and lows, hospitalizations, and more in order to help bolster the efforts of public health officials in Virginia. 

All questions will be closed by May 20th and resolved by July 27th, after which the $2500 prize pool will be awarded. 

*For more information on recent updates to the tournament scoring system, see [this discussion post](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/8506/metaculus-tournament-scoring-updated-4622/).*

### Initial Tournament Announcement
We’re excited to announce the launch of Round 1 of the [Real-Time Pandemic Decision Making Tournament](https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/realtimepandemic/). This tournament will consist of COVID-19 related questions written in conjunction with the [University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute](https://biocomplexity.virginia.edu/) to support decision-making at the [Virginia Department of Health](https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/), and will feature a $2,500 prize pool.

This round will be one of the first to use the new [Metaculus Tournament Scoring System](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/8506/new-metaculus-tournament-scoring-system-pt-1/). For 1-week duration questions the community median will be hidden for the first 3 days and visible for the last 4 days. Similarly, 3-week duration questions will hide the median for 9 days and show it for the last 12 days. The hidden period will determine a forecaster’s coverage for that question. 

We hope that forecasters enjoy this new system which is aimed at rewarding forecasting skill. We’re interested to hear from you — leave your ideas, concerns, questions, or anything else you’d like to share that’s related to the project in the comments section below.

Happy Forecasting!