Pandemics Trivia
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6correct to beat the crowd
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
All the populace: pan- means 'all' and demos 'people', the demos of democracy. Greek pandemos simply meant public or common, and English first tied the word to disease in the 1660s.
Q 02Which Greek-letter variant of the COVID-19 virus was first reported from South Africa in November 2021?
Omicron
Omicron. The WHO skipped two Greek letters to reach it: Nu, too easily confused with 'new', and Xi, because it is a common surname.
Q 03What is the term for a disease outbreak that spreads among animals across continents or worldwide?
Panzootic
Panzootic. The bird flu that wild birds carried around the world from 2020 was one: it went on to kill sea lions by the thousand and infect dairy cows in the United States.
Q 04Cancer kills many people worldwide, so what keeps it from counting as a pandemic?
It is not infectious
It is not infectious. In its strict sense a pandemic is an outbreak of a disease that passes between people, though some doctors now speak loosely of an 'obesity pandemic' as well.
Q 05What does the WHO abbreviation PHEIC stand for?
Public Health Emergency of International Concern
Public Health Emergency of International Concern: once the WHO declares one, its expert committee must meet again at least every three months to review whether the emergency still stands.
Q 06Which disease did the WHO declare a PHEIC in May 2014, fearing travellers would undo its near-eradication?
Polio
Polio. Cases had fallen by more than 99% since 1988, but in early 2014 the virus crossed borders from Pakistan, Syria and Cameroon, and the WHO feared the eradication drive would fail.
Q 07In which German city did the WHO open its pandemic early-warning hub in 2021?
Berlin
Berlin. Germany funded the hub after COVID-19 exposed gaps in how the world detects outbreaks and shares data, and Chancellor Angela Merkel opened it alongside WHO chief Tedros.
Q 08In the WHO's old six-phase influenza scale, phase 1 meant what?
Infections in animals only
Infections in animals only: at phase 1 no animal flu virus was known to have infected people. The WHO climbed to phase 6, a full pandemic, for swine flu in 2009, then dropped the scale.
Q 09Which pandemic strategy aims to push the reproduction number below 1, so that an outbreak shrinks instead of merely slowing?
Suppression
Suppression. With the number below 1, each patient infects fewer than one other person on average, so cases fall; the 2020 lockdown of Wuhan and other whole cities aimed at exactly that.
Q 10Decreasing an epidemic's peak is popularly known as what?
Flattening the curve
Flattening the curve. The 1918 flu showed why: St. Louis shut public gatherings within days, and its death rate ended up less than half that of Philadelphia, which had held a parade of 200,000.
Q 11The Plague of Athens struck in 430 BC as the city sheltered behind its walls from Sparta's army in which war?
Peloponnesian War
Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, who caught the disease and survived, described it in his history of the war; a 2006 DNA study of victims' teeth pointed to typhoid fever, but the cause is still debated.
Q 12The physician Galen recorded fever and a pustular rash during Rome's Antonine Plague, suggesting which disease?
Measles or smallpox
Measles or smallpox, with most scholars leaning to smallpox. It is thought to have come home with soldiers from a campaign in Mesopotamia, and it killed roughly one in ten people in the Roman Empire.
Q 13In which city did the Plague of Justinian supposedly kill 10,000 people a day?
Q 21In which US state did a country doctor report the first known American outbreak of the 1918 flu?
Kansas
Kansas. Dr Loring Miner warned federal health officials of a violent flu in rural Haskell County early in 1918, though some researchers argue the virus was already circulating in Europe.
Q 22Why did the 1918 flu become known as 'Spanish flu'?
Neutral Spain's press reported it freely
Neutral Spain's press reported it freely, even when King Alfonso XIII fell ill, while wartime censors elsewhere hushed it up; Spaniards themselves called it the French flu.
Q 23Which 'Big Four' leader fell ill, probably with the 1918 flu, during the Paris peace talks of 1919?
Constantinople
Constantinople. Procopius, who lived through the outbreak in the Byzantine capital, gave the figure, and recorded that Emperor Justinian himself caught the plague, swollen groin and all, yet survived.
Q 14The Plague of Justinian of 541 opened two centuries of recurring outbreaks known by what name?
First Plague Pandemic
First Plague Pandemic. It kept returning in waves until the mid-8th century, and DNA from sixth-century graves in Bavaria later showed it was caused by the same bacterium as the Black Death.
Q 15Which 1666 disaster is popularly credited with ending London's Great Plague?
Great Fire
Great Fire. It gutted the old walled City in September 1666, but plague deaths were already falling, and many had been in poor parishes outside the walls that never burned.
Q 16The first cholera pandemic spread out in 1817 from the delta of which river?
Ganges
Ganges. Cholera had long been endemic in its delta in Bengal; from 1817 trading ships and British troops carried it as far as Java, Japan and southern Russia.
Q 17The plague pandemic of the late 1800s began in which country before steamships carried it worldwide?
China
China. The outbreak smouldered in Yunnan province, reached Hong Kong in 1894 and then travelled by steamship to every inhabited continent; India suffered worst, losing more than ten million people.
Q 18Which city was the centre of the first plague epidemic in the continental United States, in 1900?
San Francisco
San Francisco. California's governor insisted there was no plague, even accusing federal doctors of faking it by injecting corpses with the bacteria; by 1904 it had killed more than a hundred people.
Q 19Who isolated the plague bacterium in Hong Kong in 1894 and later had it named after him?
Alexandre Yersin
Alexandre Yersin. Japan's Kitasato Shibasaburō spotted the bacillus in Hong Kong days before him, but Kitasato's muddled reports cost him much of the credit, and it became Yersinia pestis.
Q 20In 1898 Paul-Louis Simond reported that plague passes from rats to people through which insects' bites?
Fleas
Fleas. Simond's experiments with caged rats pointed to them, but his report was not accepted at first; a British plague commission confirmed the finding about a decade later.
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson. He took to his bed with a cough and fever on 3 April 1919, when the talks were deadlocked, and the historian John Barry argues that the illness weakened him at their most crucial point.
Q 24Which age group suffered unusually high mortality in the 1918 flu?
Young adults
Young adults. Nearly half of US deaths were among people aged 20 to 40; one theory is that their strong immune systems overreacted to the virus, though the reason is still not well understood.
Q 25Which Pacific territory recorded zero flu deaths in 1918 thanks to a strict quarantine?
American Samoa
American Samoa. Its naval governor made arriving ships sit out a quarantine, while neighbouring Western Samoa, under New Zealand rule, did not and lost about a fifth of its people.
Q 26In spring 1918 British and German soldiers both named the new flu after which region of Belgium?
Flanders
Flanders. British troops spoke of 'Flanders flu' and Germans of 'Flandern-Fieber', after the front where both armies fell ill, before the name Spanish flu took hold.
Q 27Lung tissue frozen in which region's permafrost let scientists decode the 1918 flu virus?
Alaska
Alaska. Pathologist Johan Hultin, aged 72, paid his own way to the village of Brevig Mission in 1997 and dug up a woman he named Lucy, whose lungs had stayed frozen since 1918.
Q 28The 1889-1890 'Russian flu' may actually have been caused by what kind of virus?
A coronavirus
A coronavirus. Genetic clocks suggest human coronavirus OC43 jumped from cattle around 1890, and doctors' reports of lost taste and smell read like COVID-19; today OC43 just causes common colds.
Q 29Which disease spread from one Hong Kong hotel floor to Vietnam, Singapore and Canada in 2003, yet was contained within months?
SARS
SARS. A sick doctor spent one night in room 911 of the Metropole Hotel and infected guests who flew home with the virus; it reached more than two dozen countries before the WHO declared it contained in July 2003.
Q 30What is the 1957-58 flu pandemic commonly called?
Asian flu
Asian flu. Its H2N2 virus circulated in people for 11 years, then vanished in 1968 when a descendant that kept some of its genes, the Hong Kong flu virus, took over.