September 30, 2023 Update: Virginia public health officials have concluded their consultation of forecast data. Thank you for sharing your predictions and supporting their decision making efforts! Though data will no longer be shared with VDH, the tournament continues.

March 30, 2023 Update: Learn about the impact your forecasts have already made here.

Welcome to the Keep Virginia Safe II Tournament! This is Metaculus’s second tournament contributing forecasts written in conjunction with the University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute to support decision-making at the Virginia Department of Health.

In April 2021, Metaculus and VDH launched the Keep Virginia Safe Tournament — a 12-month forecasting tournament comprising three rounds of COVID-19 and other public health policy questions. With over 224 participating Metaculus forecasters, 14,937 individual predictions, and 86 total aggregate forecasts, Keep Virginia Safe (KVS) managed to deliver early-warning signals to the VDH team, its in-state partners, and the public. These forecasts helped anticipate the effects of COVID-19, the impact of new variants, and the effectiveness of outreach and vaccine campaigns. The forecasts supported policy decisions, program development, and the effective deployment of resources. Throughout 2021, Metaculus launched two additional tournaments to support KVS — Real-Time Pandemic Decision Making and the Virginia Lightning Round Tournament.

Metaculus is proud to again contribute predictions supporting VDH and UVA’s vital work, with the launch of the Keep Virginia Safe II Tournament.

Question Themes

This Tournament will directly address key scientific and policy questions by aggregating knowledge from many experts and forecasters. 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. KVS II will ask questions on vaccination rates, booster uptake, operational logistics, and many other key indicators important to decision-makers, such as:

How many new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths can we expect in future waves?
How will the levels and causes of vaccine hesitancy change over the coming months?
How many school districts will still participate in weekly screening/testing programs?
Will there be new variants capable of overtaking Omicron?

Additional questions on variant characteristics, case counts, and hospitalizations will be released throughout 2023. These will be two question series — Variant Characteristics and Cases & Hospitalizations — which are described in more detail below.

Variant Characteristics will comprise approximately 30 sequential questions about the characteristics of new COVID-19 variants. As many as six variants will be analyzed, with questions covering:

Prevalence midpoint
Growth rate
Transmission advantage
Immune escape
Severity

Cases & Hospitalizations will involve fan graph questions for short-term forecasting targets, such as COVID-19 cases & hospitalizations at regional levels. There will likely be up to 12 unique questions, with sequential updates throughout the year.

Tournament Structure

Keep Virginia Safe II opens January 30 and runs for one year. Groups of questions will be released throughout the year:

Round 1 — 10 questions released on January 30
Round 2 — 10 questions released on March 30
Round 3 — 5 questions released on June 30
Rapid response — 20 questions released at the discretion of Metaculus and VDH

The community prediction will be hidden for 20% of the duration of each question, and participation during this time will completely determine a forecaster’s coverage (meaning the coverage weight is 100%).

A total of $20,000 will be awarded after the challenge concludes in January of 2024. Please note that this tournament features separate prize pools for its three distinct question series. All questions will be labeled with their corresponding series for forecasters’ reference. The three distinct series and their prize pools are listed below:

Keep Virginia Safe (category) — $10,000
Variant Characteristics (category ) — $5,000
Cases & Hospitalizations (category) — $5,000

We greatly appreciate the contribution of the Metaculus community to this essential initiative!

Keep Virginia Safe II

Questions