ArticleBMC infectious diseases2026
Assessing human judgment forecasts in the rapid spread of the mpox outbreak: insights and challenges for pandemic preparedness.
Article in BMC infectious diseases, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundIn May 2022, mpox (formerly monkeypox) spread to non-endemic countries rapidly. Human judgment is a forecasting approach that has been sparsely evaluated during the beginning of an outbreak.
methodsWe collected-between May 19, 2022 and July 31, 2022-1275 forecasts from 442 individuals of six questions about the mpox outbreak where ground truth data are now available. Individual human judgment forecasts and an equally weighted ensemble were evaluated, as well as compared to a random walk, autoregressive, and doubling time model.
resultsWe found (1) individual human judgment forecasts underestimated outbreak size, (2) the ensemble forecast median moved closer to the ground truth over time but uncertainty around the median did not appreciably decrease, and (3) compared to computational models, for 2-8 week ahead forecasts, the human judgment ensemble outperformed all three models when using median absolute error and weighted interval score; for one week ahead forecasts a random walk outperformed human judgment.
conclusionsWe propose two possible explanations: at the time a forecast was submitted, the mode was correlated with the most recent (and smaller) observation that would eventually determine ground truth. Several forecasts were solicited on a logarithmic scale which may have caused humans to generate forecasts with unintended, large uncertainty intervals. To aide in outbreak preparedness, platforms that solicit human judgment forecasts may wish to assess whether specifying a forecast on logarithmic scale matches an individual's intended forecast, support human judgment by finding cues that are typically used to build forecasts, and, to improve performance, tailor their platform to allow forecasters to assign zero probability to events.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.