118 Fun Facts About COVID-19

On the day in March 2020 that the WHO declared a pandemic, which US sports league abruptly suspended play?

The NBA suspended its season that night after Utah Jazz centre Rudy Gobert tested positive, hours after the WHO said the outbreak could be characterized as a pandemic.

What does the "19" in COVID-19 refer to?

The year 2019, when the first cases were identified, supplies the 19; the WHO built the name from corona, virus and disease, following its rule that a name should not point at a place or a people.

The word "coronavirus" comes from the Latin for what?

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.

Wuhan, where the outbreak began, is the capital of which Chinese province?

Hubei's capital grew from three cities at the meeting of the Han and Yangtze rivers, a transport crossroads nicknamed China's Thoroughfare; travel out of Wuhan was halted in late January 2020.

Which unusual symptom, sometimes the only one a patient noticed, became a telltale sign of COVID-19?

Loss of smell often arrived with no blocked nose at all; the virus appears to infect the support cells around the nose's smell nerves rather than the nerves themselves.

What provisional name did the WHO give the virus in January 2020?

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.

The virus enters human cells by binding which enzyme on the cell surface?

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.

Which disease's seventh pandemic, begun in 1961, was the WHO still counting as ongoing when COVID-19 emerged?

Cholera's seventh pandemic began in 1961 and has never been declared over; for COVID-19 the WHO lifted its public health emergency of international concern in May 2023 without calling the pandemic finished.

Which European country imposed the world's first nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, on 9 March 2020?

Italy imposed the first nationwide lockdown on 9 March 2020, extending a quarantine of its hardest-hit provinces to the whole country; ten days later it overtook China as the country with the most reported deaths.

Which country announced Europe's first confirmed COVID-19 cases, on 24 January 2020?

France confirmed Europe's first cases on 24 January 2020, beginning with a traveller from China treated in Bordeaux; by 17 March every country on the continent had reported the virus.

Which continent was the last to record confirmed COVID-19 cases?

Antarctica stayed free of the virus until December 2020, when 36 people at Chile's Bernardo O'Higgins base tested positive days after a navy supply ship, some of whose crew were infected, had called there.

Which cruise ship was quarantined in the Port of Yokohama in early 2020?

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!.

Which Wuhan ophthalmologist warned colleagues of early infections, was admonished by police, and died in early 2020?

Li Wenliang died of COVID-19 on 7 February 2020 after warning fellow doctors in a chat group in late December; an official inquiry later exonerated him, and Wuhan police revoked their reprimand and apologised to his family.

The lockdown of Wuhan in early 2020 lasted how long?

76 days separated 23 January 2020, when the city was sealed off, from 8 April, when residents with a green health code on their phones were finally allowed to leave.

By early April 2020, roughly how many people worldwide had been told to stay at home?

3.9 billion people, about half of humanity, in more than 90 countries and territories had been told to stay home by early April 2020; daily global carbon dioxide emissions fell by about 17 percent as a result.

Which country's nationwide lockdown, begun on 25 March 2020, was the largest of the pandemic?

India's lockdown confined its whole population from midnight on 24 March 2020; with transport halted, thousands of migrant workers walked home, part of a movement of people described as the largest since Partition in 1947.

When naming Omicron in 2021, the WHO skipped Nu and which other Greek letter?

Xi was passed over because it is a common surname, the WHO said, and Nu because it sounds like 'new'; the labels jumped from Mu straight to Omicron in November 2021.

Which country first reported the Omicron variant to the WHO, in late 2021?

South Africa's genomic surveillance network reported Omicron to the WHO on 24 November 2021, and it was named a variant of concern two days later; that same day several countries banned travel from southern Africa.

Where was the Alpha variant of the coronavirus first detected, in autumn 2020?

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.

Which variant overtook Alpha to become the world's dominant strain in mid-2021?

Delta was becoming the globally dominant strain by June 2021, the WHO said, and Alpha all but disappeared; within months Omicron displaced Delta in turn.

Which state epidemiologist became the face of Sweden's no-lockdown strategy during the pandemic?

Anders Tegnell, state epidemiologist until 2022, fronted a strategy that kept Sweden's shops and restaurants open; a state commission later called the early response too slow, though deaths had risen less than in most of Europe.

Which word, first used during the 2003 SARS outbreak, did the WHO revive in February 2020?

Infodemic blends information and epidemic; reviving it in 2020, the WHO worked with Google, Facebook and Twitter so that searches about the virus led to reliable advice instead of rumour.

The 2020 Great Barrington Declaration argued lockdowns could be avoided through what approach?

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.

Great Barrington, the Berkshires town that gave the anti-lockdown declaration its name, is in which US state?

Massachusetts is home to Great Barrington, where the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank, hosted the three scientists who drafted and signed the declaration on 4 October 2020.

Who, aged 90, received the first dose of Britain's vaccine rollout on 8 December 2020?

Margaret Keenan got the jab at 6:31 am, a week before turning 91, and called it the best early birthday present because she could see family again after most of a year on her own.

The first non-trial vaccination in December 2020 took place in which English city?

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.

When did the US FDA grant its first emergency use authorisation for a COVID-19 vaccine?

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.

Which biochemist shared the 2023 Nobel in Medicine for discoveries enabling mRNA vaccines?

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.

Which modified nucleoside did the Nobel-winning mRNA work use to avoid triggering immune alarms?

Pseudouridine, swapped in for uridine, let synthetic mRNA slip past the immune system's alarms; unmodified mRNA set off inflammation, while the modified version also produced far more protein.

Pfizer–BioNTech's vaccine had to be shipped at about −70 °C, packed in which coolant?

Dry ice, frozen carbon dioxide at about −78 °C, kept the specially designed shipping boxes cold enough; aircraft can carry only limited amounts, because the gas it gives off as it warms is a hazard in flight.

BioNTech, the company behind Comirnaty, is headquartered in which German city, the birthplace of Gutenberg?

Mainz is home to BioNTech, founded in 2008 to develop cancer immunotherapies; in January 2020 its chief Uğur Şahin turned the whole company towards a coronavirus vaccine instead.

What internal name did BioNTech give its COVID-19 vaccine programme, launched in January 2020?

Project Lightspeed began in late January 2020, days after the virus's genetic sequence was published: BioNTech put all its resources into the effort and drew up 20 vaccine candidates.

The Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine uses a modified adenovirus taken from which animal as its vector?

The vector, ChAdOx1, is a weakened chimpanzee adenovirus chosen because humans lack pre-existing immunity to it; several rival vaccines used human adenoviruses instead.

Under what brand name did the Serum Institute of India market the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine?

Covishield, the Serum Institute's version of the vaccine, was the mainstay of the COVAX sharing scheme until its home government suspended vaccine exports in March 2021 to meet a second wave of infections.

Which COVID-19 vaccine's initial course was a single dose?

Johnson & Johnson's Janssen vaccine, an adenovirus-vector shot, was authorised as a single dose in February 2021 and could be kept in an ordinary refrigerator, which suited low- and middle-income countries.

Which vaccine did its government register on 11 August 2020, hailing it as the world's first against COVID-19?

Sputnik V, named after the first artificial satellite, was registered by Russia on 11 August 2020, before the vaccine had even entered phase 3 trials; the brand came from the Russian Direct Investment Fund.

Russia's first registered COVID-19 vaccine was developed at which research institute?

The vaccine came from Moscow's Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, which built it on two human adenovirus vectors, Ad26 and Ad5; Brazil's regulator Anvisa refused import in April 2021 over quality concerns.

Novavax's Nuvaxovid belongs to which category of vaccine?

Nuvaxovid is a protein subunit vaccine: spike proteins grown in moth cells are assembled into nanoparticles and paired with Matrix-M, an immune booster extracted from the bark of the soapbark tree.

China's CoronaVac and Sinopharm vaccines belong to which category of vaccine?

Inactivated virus vaccines such as CoronaVac use whole coronavirus grown in cell culture, killed with a chemical and mixed with an aluminium adjuvant; unlike the mRNA shots, CoronaVac never needed to be frozen.

Roughly how many doses of COVID-19 vaccine had been administered worldwide by August 2024?

More than 13 billion doses had been given by August 2024, reaching about 70 percent of the world's people; one study estimates the vaccines prevented at least 14.4 million deaths in their first year.

Which US programme, launched in May 2020, aimed to deliver 300 million vaccine doses?

Operation Warp Speed paid drugmakers to manufacture vaccine candidates while trials were still running, an expensive gamble meant to have doses ready to ship the moment regulators said yes.

Which island nation declared itself free of COVID-19 on 8 June 2020 after closing its borders and locking down early?

New Zealand shut its borders on 19 March 2020 and locked down a week later; when it reported no active cases on 8 June, Jacinda Ardern said she had done a little dance.

Anthony Fauci had advised every US president since which one?

Ronald Reagan was in office when Fauci took over the government's infectious-disease institute in 1984; AIDS activist Larry Kramer called him an 'incompetent idiot' in those years, yet the two became close friends.

When President Trump was hospitalised with COVID-19 in October 2020, where was he treated?

Trump spent three nights at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, from 2 October 2020, receiving Regeneron's experimental antibody cocktail, remdesivir and a steroid.

Which US law from 1950 was invoked in 2020 to secure ventilators and masks?

The Defense Production Act, passed at the start of the Korean War, lets the president make companies put government orders first; Trump used it in March 2020 to order General Motors to build ventilators.

Which steroid did Britain's RECOVERY trial show in June 2020 cut deaths among COVID-19 patients on oxygen?

Dexamethasone was the first drug shown to save lives in COVID-19: Britain's RECOVERY trial reported in June 2020 that it cut deaths by about a third among ventilated patients and a fifth among those on oxygen.

Which Pfizer COVID-19 pill combines nirmatrelvir and ritonavir?

Paxlovid pairs nirmatrelvir with ritonavir, an HIV drug that slows the body's breakdown of the antiviral; in the trial behind its authorisation it cut hospital admission or death by 88 percent in high-risk patients.

Which London venue housed the first NHS Nightingale field hospital, opened in April 2020?

ExCeL London, an exhibition centre in the Docklands, was fitted out with capacity for up to 4,000 beds and opened on 3 April 2020, yet it treated only 54 patients in the first wave before going on standby.

Rapid antigen tests that can be done at home are also known by what name?

Lateral flow tests detect viral proteins on a paper strip within half an hour; they are less sensitive than laboratory PCR, but their low cost made them the workhorse of mass testing in 2021 and 2022.

The US CDC defined social distancing as keeping approximately what distance from others?

Six feet, about two metres, was the CDC's rule; the WHO settled on one metre, and England eased its own two-metre rule in July 2020 to 'one metre plus' where masks or other safeguards were in use.

Which 1957 Isaac Asimov novel portrays a planet whose people live by social distancing?

In The Naked Sun the Solarians live on vast estates, 'view' each other by hologram and find physical presence repulsive; detective Elijah Baley must overcome his own agoraphobia to investigate a murder there.

Which Netflix documentary series, released in March 2020, became a lockdown sensation?

Tiger King reached 34.3 million US viewers in its first ten days by Nielsen's count; its star, the zookeeper Joe Exotic, had been arrested over a murder-for-hire plot against an animal-rights campaigner.

Management professor Anthony Klotz coined which pandemic-era phrase in May 2021?

Great Resignation was Klotz's forecast of mass quitting: workers who had stayed put through the pandemic's uncertainty, he argued, were burnt out, rethinking their priorities and ready to move on.

Zoom, the video app that defined lockdown, was founded in 2011 by which former Cisco engineer?

Eric Yuan, who had led engineering for Cisco's WebEx, founded Zoom in 2011; its daily meeting participants jumped from about 10 million before the pandemic to more than 200 million in March 2020.

Which Japanese prime minister agreed with the IOC in March 2020 to postpone the Tokyo Olympics?

Shinzo Abe proposed a one-year delay and IOC president Thomas Bach agreed on 24 March 2020, the only postponement in Olympic history; Abe resigned through ill health that year, so Yoshihide Suga led Japan when the Games opened.

Wimbledon 2020 was cancelled on 1 April 2020, the first cancellation since when?

World War II had last stopped Wimbledon, from 1940 to 1945; the All England Club had paid for pandemic insurance every year since 2003, so the 2020 cancellation brought a payout of more than £100 million.

Which golf major, normally played in April, was held in November in 2020?

The Masters moved to 12–15 November 2020 and was played without spectators; Dustin Johnson won with a record 20 under par, while the Open Championship, by contrast, was cancelled outright.

Which famous American horse race was pushed from May to September in 2020 and run without spectators?

The Kentucky Derby ran on 5 September 2020, won by Authentic; the Belmont Stakes had already been held in June, so the Derby was not the opening leg of racing's three-race series for the first time since 1931.

The WHO estimated in 2022 that the pandemic's true toll by the end of 2021 was 14.9 million by counting what?

Excess deaths are all deaths above the number expected from earlier years; the WHO's 14.9 million for 2020 and 2021 therefore also counts people who died because overwhelmed health systems could not treat them.

Protesters against China's zero-COVID rules in November 2022 held up what, giving the movement its nickname?

Blank paper, a wordless protest against censorship, gave the A4 or 'white paper' protests their name after a deadly apartment fire in Urumqi; within weeks China had abandoned zero-COVID, the last major country to do so.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the face of the global response, is from which country?

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was Ethiopia's health minister and then foreign minister before becoming the WHO's first African head in 2017; he often recalls a younger brother who died in childhood, probably of a preventable disease.

Many of the earliest known COVID-19 cases were linked to which Wuhan market?

The Huanan Seafood Market, which also sold live wild mammals such as raccoon dogs, was closed for disinfection on 1 January 2020; two-thirds of the first patients identified had been exposed to it.

Which Nintendo Switch game, released days into lockdown in March 2020, became a pandemic phenomenon?

Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold 13.41 million copies in its first six weeks as locked-down players held weddings and graduation ceremonies on its islands; Joe Biden's campaign even issued yard signs for the game.

What does the R number, a fixture of pandemic briefings, measure?

People infected by each case is what R counts: above 1 an outbreak grows, below 1 it shrinks; in May 2020 Boris Johnson told Britons their new COVID alert level would be set mainly by R and the number of cases.

COVID-19 was the WHO's sixth public health emergency of international concern; which 2009 outbreak was the first?

Swine flu prompted the first such declaration in April 2009, under rules written after the SARS outbreak; COVID-19's, the sixth, was made on 30 January 2020 and lifted in May 2023.

South Korea's first big cluster, in Daegu in February 2020, spread at what kind of gathering?

Church services of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in Daegu spread the virus to thousands of members; in March 2020 its 88-year-old founder Lee Man-hee knelt at a news conference to apologise to the nation.

The closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 were found in which animals?

The closest known relatives, such as RaTG13 from Yunnan and the BANAL viruses from Laos, are coronaviruses of horseshoe bats, sharing around 96 to 97 percent of their genome with SARS-CoV-2.

Which tennis star was deported from Australia in January 2022 over his vaccination status?

Novak Djokovic, unvaccinated, had his visa cancelled twice and was deported on 16 January 2022, the day before the Australian Open began; Rafael Nadal went on to win the title.

Which Oscar-winning actor revealed in March 2020 that he and his wife had caught COVID-19 while filming in Australia?

Tom Hanks was in Queensland to play Elvis Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, and the diagnosis halted the shoot.

Which country star's $1 million gift to Vanderbilt University helped fund early research on an mRNA coronavirus vaccine?

Dolly Parton was vaccinated at Vanderbilt in March 2021 with the very jab her donation had helped to develop, and urged her fans to follow.

Denmark ordered the cull of its entire farmed population of which animal in late 2020 over a coronavirus mutation?

Mink in their millions were killed after a variant labelled Cluster 5 passed from the farms back to people in northern Jutland.

The US CDC suggests humming which song twice, from beginning to end, to time a twenty-second handwash?

Happy Birthday hummed twice lasts roughly twenty seconds, the scrub the CDC says is needed to remove most germs, whatever the water temperature.

The price of which commodity fell below zero for the first time in April 2020 as lockdowns crushed global demand?

Crude oil for May delivery sank to about minus $37 a barrel on 20 April 2020, because traders with nowhere to store it paid buyers to take it away.

The second person vaccinated in Britain's 2020 rollout, a man of 81, shared his name with which writer?

William Shakespeare came from Warwickshire, the Bard's own county, and was the first man vaccinated in the rollout.

Which 2011 Steven Soderbergh thriller about a deadly new virus surged back into popularity as the pandemic began?

Contagion drew on advice from the WHO and epidemiologists such as Ian Lipkin, and its fictional virus mixes pig and bat genetic material.

Which singer surprise-released the album Folklore in July 2020 after conceiving it in isolation during the pandemic?

Taylor Swift built Folklore by swapping files with producers Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff, and it won the Grammy for Album of the Year.

Which billionaire warned in a 2015 TED Talk, after the Ebola crisis, that the world was unready for another epidemic?

Bill Gates called for scenario planning, vaccine research and health-worker training, arguing that Ebola had been contained in 2014 partly through luck.

The NBA completed its 2019–20 season inside a sealed bubble at which Florida resort, with no fans in the stands?

Walt Disney World housed 22 teams at its ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex, and the park's MagicBand wristbands doubled as check-in and contact-tracing devices.

Which antiparasitic drug drew an FDA warning after people took veterinary doses meant for horses to treat COVID-19?

Ivermectin won its discoverers a share of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine as a treatment for parasitic diseases such as river blindness, but large trials found no meaningful benefit against COVID-19.

Which antimalarial drug did President Trump say in 2020 that he was taking himself as a preventive against COVID-19?

Hydroxychloroquine demand surged worldwide after Trump promoted it, causing shortages, yet the RECOVERY and Solidarity trials found no benefit for hospital patients.

Which prime minister led New Zealand's 2020 elimination strategy and then won a landslide re-election that October?

Jacinda Ardern's Labour Party took 65 of the 120 seats, the first time a party had won an outright majority since New Zealand adopted proportional representation in 1996.

The first confirmed COVID-19 case in the United States, announced in January 2020, was a man living in which state?

Washington was also where a nursing home in Kirkland, a suburb of Seattle, became the scene of an early deadly outbreak weeks later.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a leading voice in the pandemic, has its headquarters in which city?

Atlanta was chosen in 1946 because the agency grew out of a wartime campaign against malaria, which was then endemic in the American South.

MERS, a coronavirus disease first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012, usually spreads to people from which animals?

Camels pass MERS on through direct contact or respiratory droplets, so the WHO advises anyone handling them to wash their hands and avoid sick animals.

The 2002 SARS outbreak, caused by a close cousin of the COVID-19 virus, began in which Chinese province?

Guangdong, which borders Hong Kong, saw the first cases in the city of Foshan, and China at first delayed reporting the outbreak to the WHO.

Which mammal, the most trafficked in the world, was studied in 2020 as a possible intermediate host of the coronavirus?

Pangolin coronaviruses were found to carry a receptor-binding domain almost identical to the pandemic virus's, which made the scaly anteater an early suspect.

Which foreign secretary deputised for Boris Johnson while the prime minister lay in intensive care with COVID-19?

Dominic Raab, who was also First Secretary of State, had been named as the stand-in two weeks earlier in case Johnson became incapacitated.

The 1918 flu pandemic, often compared with COVID-19, took its popular name from which neutral country?

Spanish flu did not begin in Spain: wartime censors elsewhere suppressed the bad news, so uncensored Spanish newspapers made the country look like the epicentre.

Which South American president played down COVID-19, opposed quarantine measures and caught it himself in July 2020?

Jair Bolsonaro lost two health ministers within a month as Brazil's death toll climbed, and his wife and eldest son tested positive within weeks of him.

Which president suggested vodka, saunas and driving tractors as remedies for the coronavirus in March 2020?

Alexander Lukashenko also kept the Belarusian football league playing in front of crowds when every other top flight in Europe had been suspended.

John Magufuli, the president who declared COVID-19 defeated by prayer and had a papaya tested for it, led which country?

Tanzania stopped publishing official case figures in late April 2020, and Magufuli died in office in March 2021, officially of a heart condition.

Which secretive country, alone among sovereign states, never officially reported a single case of COVID-19?

Turkmenistan's government censored information on the disease and kept its count at zero, yet it registered two Russian-made vaccines in January 2021.

The 2020 Eurovision Song Contest, the only edition ever cancelled, was due to be staged in which Dutch city?

Rotterdam kept the hosting rights and staged the contest a year later in the same arena, though the songs chosen for 2020 were not allowed back.

Which club ended a 30-year wait to be champions of England in June 2020, after a three-month pandemic suspension?

Liverpool clinched it without playing, when Manchester City lost 2-1 at Chelsea, sealing the club's first title of the Premier League era.

The NBA suspended its season in March 2020 after which Utah Jazz player became its first to test positive?

Rudy Gobert had jokingly touched every microphone and recorder at a press conference about the virus just two days before testing positive.

Which Australian city endured six separate lockdowns that together lasted more than 245 days across 2020 and 2021?

Melbourne's second lockdown alone ran for 112 days in 2020, one of the longest continuous lockdowns anywhere in the world.

Which Chinese city of 25 million people was put under a strict citywide lockdown in spring 2022?

Shanghai's shutdown, imposed to uphold the zero-COVID policy, was the largest in China since the first weeks of the pandemic in early 2020.

The 2022 Freedom Convoy, a truckers' protest against vaccine mandates, occupied the centre of which Canadian city?

Ottawa's occupation ended after the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act on 14 February 2022, which let banks freeze accounts linked to the protest.

Which American biotech company's mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, co-developed with the NIAID, is sold as Spikevax?

Moderna's vaccine was first given as two injections 28 days apart, and trials showed about 94% efficacy two weeks after the second dose.

The married scientists who co-founded BioNTech are both children of immigrants to Germany from which country?

Turkey was the homeland of both families: Şahin arrived in Germany aged four, and the couple later became the first Germans with Turkish roots among the country's 100 wealthiest people.

Which antiviral, first developed against hepatitis C and later tested on Ebola, was authorised to treat COVID-19?

Remdesivir's maker flew its entire stock, 100 kilograms of powder left over from Ebola research, to a California plant in February 2020 to start filling vials.

Which American biochemist shared a 1993 Nobel Prize for inventing PCR, the technique behind laboratory COVID-19 tests?

Kary Mullis devised the polymerase chain reaction in 1983 while working as a DNA chemist at the Cetus Corporation, despite little experience in molecular biology.

Which medical term names the loss of the sense of smell, a common and sometimes lingering symptom of COVID-19?

Anosmia can be dangerous as well as dispiriting, because it stops people noticing gas leaks, fire, noxious fumes and spoiled food.

Who replaced health secretary Alex Azar as chair of the White House Coronavirus Task Force in late February 2020?

Mike Pence brought in Deborah Birx, a veteran of the global fight against AIDS, as the task force's response coordinator within a day.

Which US governor received an International Emmy for his 2020 coronavirus briefings, only for it to be rescinded?

Andrew Cuomo lost the award in August 2021, the morning after he left office over a report on sexual harassment allegations against him.

Which university's online dashboard, built by engineer Lauren Gardner, became a global tracker of COVID-19 cases?

Johns Hopkins launched the map on 22 January 2020, and it went on to log more than 200 billion data requests from the public, researchers and health agencies.

Which Oxford vaccinologist, co-creator of the AstraZeneca vaccine, was honoured with her own Barbie doll in 2021?

Sarah Gilbert also received a standing ovation from the crowd at the Wimbledon tennis championships in June 2021.

Which scheme, run by Gavi, CEPI and the WHO, was set up to give poorer countries fair access to COVID-19 vaccines?

COVAX stood for COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access, and it relied on UNICEF as its key partner for delivering the doses.

Which comedian wrote, filmed and performed the Netflix special Inside alone in his guest house during the pandemic?

Bo Burnham worked with no crew or audience, and the special won him three Emmys, a Peabody Award and a Grammy for one of its songs.

Which US Navy hospital ship was stationed in New York City for a month in spring 2020 to relieve the city's hospitals?

USNS Comfort had last come to the city's aid after the attacks of 11 September 2001, when it was sent to a pier in midtown Manhattan.

Which Austrian ski resort became a major early hotspot of COVID-19 in Europe, with cases traced to one après-ski bar?

Ischgl's outbreak was traced largely to the Kitzloch bar, where shared whistles were the likely route of infection.

Captain Brett Crozier lost his command in 2020 after pleading for help with an outbreak aboard which aircraft carrier?

USS Theodore Roosevelt was ordered to Guam, where most of the crew went ashore after the letter leaked; hundreds tested positive, including Crozier himself.

The Italian Army was sent in March 2020 to carry coffins out of which Lombardy city, the worst hit in the country?

Bergamo's authorities could no longer process the number of dead, so soldiers took coffins from churches and morgues to crematoriums in other provinces.

Which star of The Office launched the web series Some Good News from his Brooklyn home in March 2020?

John Krasinski paid for the show himself, hosted a live-streamed prom, and sold it to ViacomCBS after eight episodes.

Which pop star curated One World: Together at Home, the 2020 benefit concert supporting the World Health Organization?

Lady Gaga worked with the campaign group Global Citizen, and the show raised money for the WHO's COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.

Which $2.2 trillion relief law, signed in March 2020, sent one-time payments of $1,200 to most single American adults?

CARES Act spending was the largest economic stimulus package in US history, and it also created the Paycheck Protection Program of forgivable loans for small firms.

Abdala and Soberana 02, two COVID-19 vaccines that passed late-stage trials in 2021, were developed in which country?

Cuba named Abdala after a patriotic drama by its independence hero José Martí, and produced Soberana 02 at its Finlay Institute.

Wuhan, the city where COVID-19 was first detected, stands where the Han River flows into which far longer river?

Yangtze and Han together divide Wuhan into three towns, Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang, and the city's transport links earned it the nickname the Chicago of China.