This covid trivia quiz has 70 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 70 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
The WHO had already declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern six weeks earlier, when 7,818 infections had been confirmed.
Q 02What does the "19" in COVID-19 refer to?
The year 2019
WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus spelled it out: CO for corona, VI for virus, D for disease and 19 for the year the outbreak was first identified.
Q 03The word "coronavirus" comes from the Latin for what?
Crown
Under an electron microscope the virions have a fringe of bulbous projections that reminded virologists of the solar corona; the word was first used in print in Nature in 1968.
Q 04Wuhan, where the outbreak began, is the capital of which Chinese province?
Hubei
With nearly 14 million people it is China's seventh-most-populous city and a major rail interchange, which helped the virus spread during the Chinese New Year migration.
Q 05On which date did the WHO issue the official names COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2?
11 February
WHO guidance since 2015 has avoided place names and groups of people in disease names, which is why "Wuhan coronavirus" was never adopted.
Q 06What provisional name did the WHO give the virus in January 2020?
2019-nCoV
The n stood for novel; the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses replaced it with SARS-CoV-2 the following month.
Q 07The virus enters human cells through the receptor for which enzyme?
ACE2
That receptor is most abundant on type II alveolar cells in the lungs, which is why the lungs take the worst of the disease.
Q 08In which month and year did the WHO declare COVID-19 no longer a public health emergency of international concern?
May 2023
Several outlets reported that the pandemic was therefore "over"; the WHO pointed out it does not declare pandemics ended and still counts cholera as one that began in 1961.
Q 09Which country was the first in the world to introduce a national lockdown?
Italy
It was also the first European nation with a major outbreak and on 19 March 2020 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
By 17 March every country in Europe had a confirmed case, and by the following day more than 250 million Europeans were in lockdown.
Q 11By 17 March 2020 every European country had reported at least one death except which one?
Vatican City
San Marino, by contrast, ended up with one of the highest per-capita death rates in the world during the first wave.
Q 12Which continent was the last to record confirmed COVID-19 cases?
Antarctica
Its research stations held out until December 2020, when cases were confirmed at a Chilean base.
Q 13Which cruise ship was quarantined in the Port of Yokohama in early 2020?
Diamond Princess
At least 712 of the 3,711 people aboard were infected; passenger Gay Courter later published a book about it called Quarantine!.
Q 21What is the PANGO lineage designation of the Omicron variant?
B.1.1.529
B.1.1.7 was Alpha, B.1.617.2 was Delta and P.1 was Gamma; Omicron's sub-lineages BA.1 to BA.5 were tracked as separate variants of concern until March 2023.
Q 22Who was Sweden's state epidemiologist during the pandemic, from 2013 until his resignation in 2022?
Anders Tegnell
He publicly denied that herd immunity was the plan, but emails later uncovered by the media suggested otherwise.
Q 23What word did the WHO coin in March 2020 for the flood of incorrect information about the virus?
Infodemic
Confirmation bias and other cognitive shortcuts have been linked to belief in the resulting conspiracy theories, including vaccine hesitancy.
Q 14Which Wuhan ophthalmologist warned colleagues of early infections, was admonished by police, and died in early 2020?
Li Wenliang
He was 34. An official inquiry later exonerated him and Wuhan police formally apologised to his family.
Q 15The lockdown of Wuhan, which lasted nearly three months, officially ended on which date?
8 April
It was the first lockdown of the pandemic; the city reopened once Hubei province had gone without new domestic cases.
Q 16By early April 2020, roughly how many people worldwide had been told to stay at home?
3.9 billion
That was more than half of humanity, spread across more than 90 countries and territories.
Q 17Which country's lockdown, covering around 1.3bn people, was the largest of all?
India
At the same time nearly 300 million Americans, about 90% of the US population, were under some form of stay-at-home order.
Q 18What did the WHO use to name variants of concern such as Alpha, Delta and Omicron?
Greek letters
The scientific PANGO lineage names carried on underneath, so Omicron was still B.1.1.529 to virologists.
Q 19The Omicron variant was first detected in which country in late 2021?
South Africa
The WHO declared it a variant of concern within days; by 1 January 2022 Europe had passed 100 million cases in the surge it caused.
Q 20The Alpha variant, identified in 33 countries by 2 January 2021, was first discovered where?
The UK
Its changes to the spike protein made it more infectious, and it forced Britain into a third national lockdown that month.
Q 24The 2020 Great Barrington Declaration argued lockdowns could be avoided through what approach?
Focused protection
Its online signature list, which anyone could join by ticking a box, turned out to include "Mr Banana Rama" and the serial killer Harold Shipman.
Q 25Great Barrington, the town that gave the anti-lockdown declaration its name, is in which US state?
Massachusetts
It was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank based there.
Q 26Who, aged 90, was the first person outside a trial to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, on 8 December 2020?
Margaret Keenan
Brian Pinker was first with the AstraZeneca jab a month later, and Elle Taylor first in the UK with Moderna in April 2021.
Q 27The first non-trial vaccination in December 2020 took place in which English city?
Coventry
A Lancet study later estimated that UK vaccination prevented 507,000 deaths in its first year.
Q 28Which regulator became the first in the world to approve an mRNA vaccine, on 2 December 2020?
Britain's MHRA
The FDA followed with an emergency use authorisation later that month and authorised Moderna's vaccine a week after that.
Q 29Which Hungarian-born biochemist shared the 2023 Nobel in Medicine for discoveries enabling mRNA vaccines?
Katalin Karikó
She shared it with immunologist Drew Weissman; the pair had been demoted and denied grants for years before the pandemic vindicated their work.
Q 30The Nobel-winning mRNA breakthrough replaced uridine with which modified nucleoside?
Pseudouridine
Without the swap, injected mRNA triggered inflammation and was destroyed before it could make any protein.