50 free Pandemics trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This pandemics trivia quiz spans 2,500 years of outbreaks. It starts with the Plague of Athens and the Antonine Plague, moves through Justinian's pandemic, the Black Death and the third plague pandemic that gave us Yersinia pestis, then covers the cholera waves, the 1889 'Russian flu' that may have been a coronavirus, the 1918 influenza and its misleading Spanish name, the Asian and Hong Kong flus, the 2009 swine flu and the eradication of smallpox. It also asks how pandemics are fought: where 'quarantine' comes from, the village of Eyam, the zero-death islands of 1918, John Snow and cholera, flattening the curve, the WHO's PHEIC label and its Berlin Pandemic Hub. The early questions suit anyone who followed the news in 2020; the late ones reward readers who know which army camp seeded 1918 and who ran the last smallpox campaign. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'pandemic' comes from Greek roots meaning what?
All the populace
Pan- means 'all, every' and demos 'people'; in Modern Greek it still means 'concerning all the people'.
Q 02Which is described as the deadliest pandemic in history?
1918 influenza
The H1N1 outbreak infected about a third of the world, killing more people in 25 weeks than AIDS did in its first 25 years.
Q 03What is the term for a pandemic among non-human animals?
Panzootic
Rinderpest, a cattle disease, is the only other infection besides smallpox to have been eradicated.
Q 04Why is cancer not considered a pandemic despite killing many people?
It is not infectious
A pandemic must be infectious, not merely widespread or deadly.
Q 05What does the WHO abbreviation PHEIC stand for?
Public Health Emergency of International Concern
It is the WHO's nearest equivalent to declaring a pandemic; COVID-19 held the status from January 2020 to May 2023.
Q 06Which disease was declared a PHEIC in 2014 despite only 482 cases the previous year?
Polio
The concern was that it might break out of its endemic areas; the status is reviewed regularly and still ongoing.
Q 07Where did the WHO open its Pandemic Hub in September 2021?
Berlin
Its tools include AI that scans more than 35,000 data feeds for signs of emerging health threats.
Q 08In the WHO's old six-phase influenza scale, phase 1 meant what?
Infections in animals only
Phase 6 was a full pandemic; a WHO spokesperson confirmed in 2020 that the system is no longer used.
Q 09Reducing the basic reproduction number below 1 is the goal of which strategy?
Suppression
China used it during COVID-19 by locking down entire cities.
Q 10Decreasing an epidemic's peak is popularly known as what?
Flattening the curve
The aim is to keep health services from being overwhelmed and buy time for vaccines and treatments.
Q 11The Plague of Athens of 430 BC has been identified from teeth as which disease?
Typhoid fever
University of Athens researchers analysed a mass grave beneath the city in 2006.
Q 12The Antonine Plague of 165 to 180 AD was probably which disease?
Measles or smallpox
Soldiers returning from the Near East brought it to Italy; it killed up to five million.
Q 13In which city did the Plague of Justinian supposedly kill 10,000 people a day?
Constantinople
The Byzantine chronicler Procopius gave the figure; the outbreak had begun in Egypt the year before.
Q 21Where were the earliest probable cases of the 1918 flu documented?
Haskell County, Kansas
Further cases followed in France, Germany and the UK that April.
Q 22Why did the 1918 flu become known as 'Spanish flu'?
Neutral Spain's press reported it freely
Wartime censors elsewhere suppressed bad news, so Spain looked like the epicentre.
Q 23Which US Army training ground helped spread the 1918 flu as troops shipped out?
Camp Funston
The disease reached the Western Front by mid-April 1918.
Q 14The outbreak that began under Justinian in 541 is also known by what name?
First Plague Pandemic
It began in 541 and recurred in waves until the middle of the 8th century.
Q 15Roughly what share of London's population died in the Great Plague of 1665-66?
20%
About 100,000 people died; it was one of more than 100 European plague epidemics after the Black Death.
Q 16Where did the 1817-1824 cholera pandemic begin?
Bengal
Previously endemic to the Indian subcontinent, it spread to China, Java and the Caspian Sea before receding.
Q 17In which Chinese province did the third plague pandemic begin in 1855?
Yunnan
It reached every inhabited continent and killed at least 15 million, most of them in British India.
Q 18Which city saw the first plague outbreak in the United States, in 1900?
San Francisco
The outbreak lasted until 1904 during the third pandemic.
Q 19Who isolated the plague bacterium in Hong Kong in 1894?
Alexandre Yersin
Yersinia pestis is named after the Swiss-born French bacteriologist.
Q 20Which animals' fleas were found to spread plague in cities, enabling control measures?
Rats
The pandemic was judged over in 1959 when annual plague deaths fell below 200.
Q 24Which age group suffered unusually high mortality in the 1918 flu?
Young adults
Most flu outbreaks hit the very young and very old hardest instead.
Q 25Which Pacific territory recorded zero flu deaths in 1918 thanks to a strict quarantine?
American Samoa
Governor John Martin Poyer sealed it from all ships; neighbouring Western Samoa lost over 20% of its people.
Q 26What did British soldiers call the 1918 flu in spring that year?
Flanders flu
Germans said Flandern-Fieber; the French briefly called it American flu before switching to Spanish.
Q 27In what year was the 1918 virus's genetic sequence finally determined?
2005
Researchers used historic tissue samples to reconstruct the H1N1 strain.
Q 28The 1889-1890 'Russian flu' may actually have been caused by what kind of virus?
A coronavirus
Several researchers in the early 2020s pointed to human coronavirus OC43.
Q 29In which Central Asian city was the 1889 pandemic conventionally first reported?
Bukhara
It was the first pandemic to spread not just across a region but worldwide, helped by railways and steamships.
Q 30The 1957-58 Asian flu was caused by which influenza subtype?
H2N2
A decade later a reassorted H3N2 strain caused the Hong Kong flu.