Thanks. I'll definitely aim to produce them more quickly... this one got away from me.
My understanding is that we also have and might in the future also spend a decent amount of time in a "level 2.5", where some but not all non-essential businesses are open (i.e., no groups larger than ten, restaurants are closed to dine-in, hair salons are open).
A binary search strategy still could be more efficient, depending on the ratio of positives to negatives.
What about binary search?
This is a good answer.
Not really an answer, but a statement and a question - I imagine this is literally the least neglected issue in the world right now. How much does that affect the calculus? How much should we defer to people with more domain expertise?
This paper also seems helpful: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.11118.pdf
PredictionBook is really great for lightweight, private predictions and does everything you're looking for. Metaculus is great for more fully-featured predicting and I believe also supports private questions, but may be a bit of overkill for your use case. A spreadsheet also seems more than sufficient, as others have mentioned.