47 Fun Facts About 2020 Year in Review

Which film became the first non-English-language movie to win Best Picture at the 2020 Oscars?

Parasite. South Korea had been submitting films to the Oscars since 1962 without earning a single nomination, then Bong Joon-ho's thriller won four awards in one night.

Which city was placed under quarantine on 23 January 2020, with all transport halted?

Wuhan. The mayor said about five million people had already left the city of 11 million for the Lunar New Year holiday before it was sealed.

Which actor revealed a positive COVID test from Australia the day the WHO declared a pandemic?

Tom Hanks. He and Rita Wilson fell ill while he prepared to play Elvis Presley's manager, and the NBA suspended its season the same night.

Which country was the first to impose a nationwide quarantine in response to COVID-19?

Italy. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte stretched a lockdown of the north to all 60 million people, telling them to stay at home under measures he summed up as 'I stay home'.

Which team won Super Bowl LIV in February 2020, beating the San Francisco 49ers 31–20?

Kansas City Chiefs. They trailed 20–10 going into the fourth quarter, then Patrick Mahomes led 21 unanswered points to end the franchise's 50-year title drought.

Who co-headlined the Super Bowl LIV halftime show with Shakira?

Jennifer Lopez. Her 11-year-old daughter Emme joined her on stage, backed by a children's chorus, to lead the way into 'Let's Get Loud'.

Who hosted the Grammys at Staples Center hours after Kobe Bryant's death?

Alicia Keys. She told the room it was 'heartbroken in the house that Kobe Bryant built', then sang a farewell with Boyz II Men.

Where did the NBA finish its 2019–20 season inside a bio-secure bubble?

Walt Disney World. Each player was handed a MagicBand, the wristband theme-park guests use as a room key, and the league also used it to check players in for virus tests.

Which team won the 2020 NBA Finals, beating the Miami Heat 4–2?

Los Angeles Lakers. They had missed the playoffs in each of the previous six seasons, the longest drought in franchise history, before LeBron James led them to a 17th title.

Which Texas ballpark hosted the entire 2020 World Series as a neutral site?

Globe Life Field. The Texas Rangers' new park had crowds barred all season, so its first baseball fans came for playoff games the Rangers weren't in; no World Series had stayed in one park since 1944.

Which team won the 2020 World Series in six games, its first title since 1988?

Dodgers. Third baseman Justin Turner was pulled in the eighth inning of the clincher after a positive COVID test, news that broke while his teammates were still celebrating on the field.

Which Nintendo Switch game released on March 20, 2020 became a lockdown phenomenon?

Animal Crossing: New Horizons. With real gatherings off limits, players held weddings, birthday parties and graduation ceremonies on its islands instead.

Which video-call app went from 10 million daily meeting participants in late 2019 to 300 million by April 2020?

Zoom. It first announced the 300 million as users, then had to correct itself: the figure counts every time someone joins a meeting, so one person can be counted several times a day.

Which game, released in 2018 to little notice, did Twitch streamers turn into a 2020 phenomenon?

Among Us. Streamers found it two years after launch, and the surge was so sudden that its small studio cancelled a planned sequel to keep the original running.

Which album did Taylor Swift surprise-release on July 24, 2020?

Folklore. She announced it less than a day ahead, saying she had written and recorded it in isolation; Aaron Dessner of The National co-wrote or produced 11 of its 16 songs.

Which docuseries did ESPN bring forward to April 2020 for sport-starved fans?

The Last Dance. ESPN said fans had been calling for it early, so it sped up production of the ten-part story of the Bulls' 1997–98 title run, Jordan's last season in Chicago.

Chadwick Boseman died in August 2020 after a private four-year battle with which illness?

Colon cancer. Diagnosed in 2016, he never spoke of it publicly and kept making films, from Marshall to Da 5 Bloods, during and between surgeries and chemotherapy.

Which fictional chess prodigy did Anya Taylor-Joy play in The Queen's Gambit?

Beth Harmon. Her story reached 62 million households in four weeks, and chess set sales shot up so fast that shops struggled to keep them in stock.

Which show swept all seven major comedy categories at the 2020 Primetime Emmys?

Schitt's Creek. In the US it spent years on a hard-to-find cable channel until Netflix brought it an audience, and 15 of its 19 Emmy nominations came for its final season.

Which game-show host kept taping through 20 months of pancreatic cancer treatment before his death in November 2020?

Alex Trebek. The Jeopardy! host of more than 36 years was last in the studio on October 29, ten days before he died at 80, and his final episodes aired the following January.

The so-called murder hornet made 2020 headlines after nests were found in which US state?

Washington. The nests were found near the Canadian border, 'murder hornet' was a media nickname for the Asian giant hornet, and officials declared it eradicated from the United States at the end of 2024.

The Tokyo Olympics, postponed in March 2020, were held a year later under which official name?

Tokyo 2020. The modern Olympics had only ever been cancelled in wartime, never delayed, and organisers kept the original name even though the Games took place in 2021.

Which 2020 hit spent 90 weeks on the Hot 100 and was later named its best-performing song ever?

Blinding Lights. The Weeknd's single was the first to spend a whole year in the Hot 100's top ten, yet it received zero Grammy nominations, and he called the awards corrupt.

Which Broadway musical's filmed stage show reached Disney+ in July 2020, 15 months before its planned cinema release?

Hamilton. Disney had paid $75 million for a live capture of the original cast and booked it into cinemas for October 2021, then sent it straight to streaming instead.

Which rock guitarist died on October 6, 2020, at age 65?

Eddie Van Halen. Beyond his own band he played the guitar solo on Michael Jackson's 'Beat It'; his former wife Valerie Bertinelli said she and their son Wolfgang held him in his last moments.

Which Christopher Nolan film was the big-budget test of reopened cinemas in 2020?

Tenet. Its July release date slipped again and again that summer, and it proved to be Nolan's last film for Warner Bros.: he took his next one to Universal.

Tiger King followed Joe Exotic's feud with which big-cat rescue owner?

Carole Baskin. In June 2020 a judge handed her Joe Exotic's former zoo, ruling he had shifted the land to his mother to dodge the roughly $1 million he owed her over a trademark case.

Margaret Keenan, 90, became the first person outside trials to receive which COVID-19 vaccine?

Pfizer–BioNTech. She called the jab the best early birthday present, a week before turning 91, and the next patient in line was an 81-year-old named William Shakespeare.

Which country was first in the world to approve a fully tested COVID-19 vaccine, on 2 Dec 2020?

United Kingdom. Its regulator cleared the jab nine days ahead of the US FDA, and mass vaccination began there six days after the approval.

Which company's capsule carried astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to orbit in May 2020?

SpaceX. Its Crew Dragon capsule, named Endeavour, ended a nine-year gap in which no astronauts had launched to orbit from American soil, and was the first crewed orbital flight run by a private company.

Which space agency's OSIRIS-REx probe briefly touched the asteroid Bennu in October 2020 to grab a sample?

NASA. The probe grabbed so much rubble that its collector jammed open and bits of asteroid leaked into space, so the team sealed the sample away early; it reached Earth in 2023.

Which organization won the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize?

World Food Programme. The committee praised its work to stop hunger being used as a weapon of war, and noted that the pandemic was sharply raising the number of people going hungry.

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for which breakthrough?

CRISPR gene editing. Their 'genetic scissors' were borrowed from bacteria, which use the system to chop up the DNA of invading viruses.

Louise Glück's 2020 Nobel made her the first American literature laureate since which songwriter?

Bob Dylan. He won in 2016; Glück, a former US poet laureate, could not travel to Stockholm in the pandemic, so she received her prize at home.

The UK's Brexit transition period expired on the last day of which month in 2020?

December. Britain had formally left the EU on 31 January, and negotiators agreed a trade treaty only on Christmas Eve, a week before the transition ran out.

Which state's result, called on November 7, 2020, pushed Joe Biden past 270 electoral votes?

Pennsylvania. Donald Trump held a wide lead there on election night because in-person ballots were counted first; it took three and a half days of mail-in counting to settle the state.

Kamala Harris was a senator for which state when she was elected US vice president in 2020?

California. She had been its attorney general before reaching the Senate in 2017, and when she left for the vice presidency the governor named Alex Padilla to her seat.

Jacinda Ardern's Labour Party won a landslide second term in October 2020 in which country?

New Zealand. Ardern had pushed the vote back a month over a fresh COVID outbreak, then won 65 of 120 seats, the first outright majority since the country adopted proportional voting in 1996.

Which city's port was devastated by an ammonium nitrate explosion on August 4, 2020?

Beirut. The 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate had come off an abandoned cargo ship and sat in a port warehouse for six years; the blast was heard as far away as Cyprus.

Which Istanbul landmark was ordered reverted from a museum to a mosque in July 2020?

A court annulled the 1934 decree that had made it a museum. Built as a cathedral in 537, it had been a mosque from 1453 until Atatürk's secularisation.

Lewis Hamilton's seventh Formula One title in 2020 equalled whose record?

Michael Schumacher. Hamilton's seventh came in a Mercedes, the team where he had taken over Schumacher's seat when the German made way at the end of 2012.

Which console, launched in November 2020, came with the DualSense controller and the built-in game Astro's Playroom?

PlayStation 5. It reached North America and Japan on November 12 and most other countries a week later, and stores sold out so fast that Sony apologised for the scramble over pre-orders.

Nepal and which other country jointly announced a new official height for Mount Everest in 2020?

China. The two had long disagreed over whether to count the snow cap, leaving China's figure almost four metres below Nepal's; they settled on 8,848.86 m, 86 cm above the old official height.

Which DeepMind AI was hailed in November 2020 for predicting proteins' 3D shapes, a 50-year challenge in biology?

AlphaFold. It has since predicted the structure of nearly all 200 million known proteins, and its creators Demis Hassabis and John Jumper shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Which two planets appeared a tenth of a degree apart in late 2020?

Jupiter and Saturn. They had not passed this close in nearly 400 years, and that meeting sat too near the Sun to see well, so 2020 gave the best night-time view of the pair in almost 800 years.

Which leader, Japan's longest-serving prime minister, resigned in August 2020 citing ill health?

Shinzo Abe. The illness was ulcerative colitis, the same bowel condition that had cut short his first term in 2007; his chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga succeeded him.

In August 2020 who became the first person with a net worth above $200 billion?

Jeff Bezos. Amazon's shares soared as shopping moved online, and he would have got there sooner had his 2019 divorce not handed MacKenzie Scott a multibillion-dollar stake in the company.