Welcome to the Keep Virginia Safe 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.

Public health officials in Virginia are currently weighing key decisions that have to be made in preparation for the fall. Some of the questions under consideration:

How many new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths can we expect in this new Delta-driven wave?
How will the levels and causes of vaccine hesitancy change over the coming months?
When will a vaccine be authorized for children under 12?
When will a vaccine receive full FDA approval?
How many school districts might participate in weekly screening/testing programs?
Will there be new variants capable of overtaking Delta?

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

The tournament will run from April 2021 until April 2022, with three types of questions:

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 that may not resolve for many years.
Fortified Essays: these questions challenge you to explain your predictions.

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