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 the day in March 2020 that the WHO declared a pandemic, which US sports league abruptly suspended play?
The NBA
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.
Q 02What does the "19" in COVID-19 refer to?
The year 2019
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.
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
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.
Q 05Which unusual symptom, sometimes the only one a patient noticed, became a telltale sign of COVID-19?
Loss of smell
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.
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 08Which disease's seventh pandemic, begun in 1961, was the WHO still counting as ongoing when COVID-19 emerged?
Cholera
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.
Q 09Which European country imposed the world's first nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, on 9 March 2020?
Italy
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.
Q 10Which country announced Europe's first confirmed COVID-19 cases, on 24 January 2020?
France
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.
Q 11Which continent was the last to record confirmed COVID-19 cases?
Antarctica
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.
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 21Which state epidemiologist became the face of Sweden's no-lockdown strategy during the pandemic?
Anders Tegnell
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.
Q 22Which word, first used during the 2003 SARS outbreak, did the WHO revive in February 2020?
Infodemic
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.
Q 23The 2020 Great Barrington Declaration argued lockdowns could be avoided through what approach?
Focused protection
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.
Q 14The lockdown of Wuhan in early 2020 lasted how long?
76 days
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.
Q 15By early April 2020, roughly how many people worldwide had been told to stay at home?
3.9 billion
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.
Q 16Which country's nationwide lockdown, begun on 25 March 2020, was the largest of the pandemic?
India
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.
Q 17When naming Omicron in 2021, the WHO skipped Nu and which other Greek letter?
Xi
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.
Q 18Which country first reported the Omicron variant to the WHO, in late 2021?
South Africa
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.
Q 19Where was the Alpha variant of the coronavirus first detected, in autumn 2020?
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 20Which variant overtook Alpha to become the world's dominant strain in mid-2021?
Delta
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.
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 Berkshires town that gave the anti-lockdown declaration its name, is in which US state?
Massachusetts
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.
Q 25Who, aged 90, received the first dose of Britain's vaccine rollout on 8 December 2020?
Margaret Keenan
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.
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
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.
Q 30Pfizer–BioNTech's vaccine had to be shipped at about −70 °C, packed in which coolant?
Dry ice
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.