COVID-19 Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
This covid trivia quiz has 118 free questions with answers and covers the whole arc of the COVID-19 pandemic, from the first cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan in December 2019 to the day in May 2023 when the WHO ended the global health emergency. It asks about the science (what the virus is named for, which receptor it uses to get into cells, why the mRNA vaccines worked), the timeline (the PHEIC declaration, the pandemic declaration, the first national lockdown, the first vaccination outside a trial), and the variants and their Greek letters. It also covers the culture of the lockdown years: Tiger King, Zoom, six feet apart, toilet paper shortages, the Great Resignation, the Olympics that were postponed and the Wimbledon that was cancelled. Easy questions ask what the 19 in COVID-19 stands for and which continent was infected last; the hard ones want Omicron's PANGO lineage, the man who ran Operation Warp Speed and the nucleoside swap that won a Nobel Prize. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the pandemic, the virus, the vaccines and the people involved, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 118 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On which date did the World Health Organization assess the COVID-19 outbreak as having become a pandemic?
11 March
On 11 March 2020 Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced the WHO's assessment that COVID-19 could be characterized as a pandemic, with more than 118,000 cases reported in 114 countries by then.
Q 02What does the "19" in COVID-19 refer to?
The year 2019
The 19 refers to the year 2019, when the outbreak was first identified; Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus explained the name as CO for corona, VI for virus and D for disease.
Q 03The word "coronavirus" comes from the Latin for what?
Crown
Corona is Latin for crown: under the electron microscope the virions' fringe of bulbous projections resembled a crown or the sun's corona, and the name first appeared in Nature in 1968.
Q 04Wuhan, where the outbreak began, is the capital of which Chinese province?
Hubei
The city is the capital of Hubei, a central Chinese province on the Yangtze; with more than 11 million people and a major rail interchange, it seeded the spread during the Chinese New Year travel rush.
Q 05On which date did the WHO announce the official name COVID-19 for the disease?
11 February
WHO Director-General Tedros announced the disease name COVID-19 on 11 February 2020; the same day the virus taxonomy body ICTV named the virus SARS-CoV-2. WHO rules since 2015 keep place names and peoples out of disease names.
Q 06What provisional name did the WHO give the virus in January 2020?
2019-nCoV
2019-nCoV, with n for novel, was the WHO's interim name from January 2020; the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses renamed the virus SARS-CoV-2 a few weeks later.
Q 07The virus enters human cells by binding which enzyme on the cell surface?
ACE2
The spike protein binds ACE2, angiotensin-converting enzyme 2, which sits on type II alveolar cells in the lungs and on cells of the gut, heart and kidneys; lung damage follows from that entry route.
Q 08In which month and year did the WHO declare COVID-19 no longer a public health emergency of international concern?
May 2023
On 5 May 2023 the WHO declared COVID-19 no longer a public health emergency of international concern; it does not formally declare pandemics over, and it has counted the seventh cholera pandemic, begun in 1961, as ongoing for decades.
Q 09Which country was the first in the world to introduce a national lockdown?
Italy
Italy imposed the first nationwide lockdown on 9 March 2020, extending Lombardy's restrictions to the whole country; on 19 March it overtook China as the country with the most reported deaths.
Q 10Europe's first confirmed case, on 24 January 2020, was in which French city?
Bordeaux
France announced Europe's first three cases on 24 January 2020: a traveller from China treated in Bordeaux, announced first, and two patients in Paris hospitals.
Q 11Which continent was the last to record confirmed COVID-19 cases?
Antarctica
Antarctica went almost a year without the virus; its first cases were confirmed in December 2020 among 36 people at Chile's Bernardo O'Higgins research base.
Q 12Which cruise ship was quarantined in the Port of Yokohama in early 2020?
Diamond Princess
The Diamond Princess was quarantined at Yokohama from early February 2020; at least 712 of the 3,711 people aboard were infected, and passenger Gay Courter later published a memoir titled Quarantine!.
Q 13Which Wuhan ophthalmologist warned colleagues of early infections, was admonished by police, and died in early 2020?
Li Wenliang
Q 21Who was Sweden's state epidemiologist during the pandemic, from 2013 until his resignation in 2022?
Anders Tegnell
Anders Tegnell, state epidemiologist from 2013, fronted Sweden's no-lockdown strategy and left in March 2022 for a WHO post; his daily briefings made him a national figure.
Q 22The WHO's 2020 'infodemic' warning revived a word coined by which political analyst in 2003?
David Rothkopf
David Rothkopf coined 'infodemic' in a Washington Post column of May 2003 about the SARS outbreak; the WHO revived it in a situation report on 2 February 2020.
Q 23The 2020 Great Barrington Declaration argued lockdowns could be avoided through what approach?
Focused protection
Li Wenliang, 33, died of COVID-19 on 7 February 2020 after warning fellow doctors in a chat group in late December; a national inquiry exonerated him and the local police withdrew their reprimand and apologised.
Q 14The lockdown of Wuhan, which lasted nearly three months, officially ended on which date?
8 April
Begun on 23 January 2020 as the pandemic's first lockdown, it ended after 76 days on 8 April 2020, when outbound travel from the city resumed.
Q 15By early April 2020, roughly how many people worldwide had been told to stay at home?
3.9 billion
An AFP tally on 2 April 2020 put the figure at 3.9 billion people, more than half of humanity, under confinement orders in more than 90 countries and territories.
Q 16Which country's lockdown, covering around 1.3bn people, was the largest of all?
India
India's lockdown from 25 March 2020 confined about 1.3 billion people, the largest anywhere; Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced it with four hours' notice.
Q 17What did the WHO use to name variants of concern such as Alpha, Delta and Omicron?
Greek letters
From May 2021 the WHO labelled variants of concern with Greek letters, Alpha through Omicron, to avoid stigmatising the countries where they were first found.
Q 18Which country first reported the Omicron variant to the WHO, in late 2021?
South Africa
South Africa's scientists reported the Omicron variant to the WHO in late 2021 and it was named a variant of concern within two days; the surge it drove took Europe past 100 million cases by 1 January 2022.
Q 19The Alpha variant, identified in 33 countries by 2 January 2021, was first discovered where?
The UK
The Alpha variant was first sequenced in Kent in the UK in autumn 2020; its spike mutations made it more transmissible and drove England into a third lockdown in January 2021.
Q 20What is the PANGO lineage designation of the Omicron variant?
B.1.1.529
Omicron's PANGO lineage is B.1.1.529; the Pango system names lineages by descent, so its main sub-lineages were written BA.1 to BA.5, BA being the alias for B.1.1.529.
The declaration proposed focused protection: shielding the elderly and vulnerable while letting the young live normally; its open signature list turned out to include "Mr Banana Rama" and the serial killer Harold Shipman.
Q 24Great Barrington, the town that gave the anti-lockdown declaration its name, is in which US state?
Massachusetts
Great Barrington is in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, home of the American Institute for Economic Research, the libertarian think tank that sponsored the declaration in October 2020.
Q 25Who, aged 90, received the first dose of Britain's vaccine rollout on 8 December 2020?
Margaret Keenan
Margaret Keenan, a 90-year-old retired jewellery shop assistant, received the first dose of Britain's rollout at 6:31 am on 8 December 2020; Brian Pinker got the first AstraZeneca jab a month later.
Q 26The first non-trial vaccination in December 2020 took place in which English city?
Coventry
The first dose of Britain's rollout was given at University Hospital Coventry at 6:31 am on 8 December 2020; the second recipient, 81-year-old William Shakespeare, came from nearby Warwickshire.
Q 27When did the US FDA grant its first emergency use authorisation for a COVID-19 vaccine?
11 December 2020
The FDA's first emergency use authorisation for a COVID-19 vaccine came on 11 December 2020, nine days after Britain's regulator acted; a second vaccine, Moderna's, was authorised on 18 December.
Q 28Which biochemist shared the 2023 Nobel in Medicine for discoveries enabling mRNA vaccines?
Katalin Karikó
Katalin Karikó shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with immunologist Drew Weissman; the University of Pennsylvania had demoted her in 1995, and their key paper appeared in 2005.
Q 29Which modified nucleoside did the Nobel-winning mRNA work use to avoid triggering immune alarms?
Pseudouridine
Swapping uridine for pseudouridine let synthetic mRNA slip past innate immune sensors; unmodified mRNA set off inflammation and was degraded before it could produce any protein.
Q 30What temperature range did the original 2020 guidance set for storing Comirnaty long-term?
−80 to −60 °C
The original guidance required storage at −80 to −60 °C in ultra-low freezers, shipped in dry ice; from early 2021 regulators also allowed two weeks at −25 to −15 °C and, later, a month at fridge temperature.