```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
```


# Topic

A topic of major concern, for the US at large and potentially for students personally, is Covid-19. To that end, I would like to know how many US residents will test positive for Covid-19 on Sunday May 23rd. At the risk of being repetitive the target is below:

> How many people in the US will test positive for Covid-19 on Sunday May 23rd?

# Questions

Specifically, I want two numbers:

1. What is your prediction? (Squared-error minimizing)
2. What is the percent chance of a >20% error in your prediction? (i.e. the ratio truth/prediction is above 1.2 or below 0.8)

# Details of Question

The answer to this question will be determined by the US [CDC's case tracker](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailytrendscases), looking at the number of people who tested positive on May 23rd. Specifically, I'll look at the CDC data on that site, sometime on May 28th. The five day delay in lookback means that we should get an accurate assessment of the number (CDC numbers take up to 5 days to fully update). 

- Not using wayback machine because it didn't work. Doesn't seem to load the relevant data. 

# Data

The CDC provides a lot of data, which is available on the resolution page.

# Submissions:

To enter the competition proper, you must submit your prediction (consisting of 2 numbers) on google forms before midnight on May 21st. The [google form is here](https://forms.gle/46D67XojchbjVpnA6). 

You are permitted to change your submission, up to the start of class. 

You _must_ also provide a 1 to 3 sentence description of how you made your predictions in order to enter the competition, and what you think the source of a large (>20%) prediction error would be. 

# Scoring:

This is a very difficult prediction task, so I'm no longer competing directly against you (sorry!). 

Nevertheless, there will be some kind of reward sent to the top three predictions in the MSE category. 

# Ranking

The prediction: estimate this number, predictions will be ranked by mean-squared-error between your prediction and the truth.

# Future competitions

I _may_ do one more optional competition that would conclude after the class ends. If you are interested in that -- check the box on the google form. 



