Forecasting the COVID-19 Pandemic

As part of our work on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, we have contracted Good Judgment Inc. to expand its efforts to aggregate, publish, and track forecasts about the COVID-19 pandemic, with the hope that these forecasts can help improve planning by health security professionals and the broader public, limit the spread of the virus, and save lives.

The initial set of predictions, available here, are aggregated from forecasts by professional “Superforecasters,” who qualified by being in the most accurate 1-2% of forecasters from a large-scale, government-funded series of forecasting tournaments that ran from 2011-2015 (see Superforecasting) and, since then, by being in the top handful of forecasters from Good Judgment’s public forecasting platform, Good Judgment Open.

We may commission additional forecasts related to COVID-19 in the coming months, and we welcome suggestions of well-formed questions for which regularly updated forecasts would be especially helpful to public health professionals and the broader public. If you would like to suggest one or more questions for potential forecasting, please fill out this short form, especially if you are a medical or public health professional, and especially if you know how to state the forecasting question(s) precisely enough that it’s clear how to decide later how the question(s) resolved.

We’ve been funding scientific research and policy analysis on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness for several years and are glad to support the work many of our grantees are already doing to respond to this crisis. We’re continuing to support them and are pursuing other opportunities to help mitigate the effects of this pandemic, which we expect to share more about in the future.