For the majority of us, the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, dominates every aspect of our lives right now. Whether we’re worrying about how to pay the rent due to job loss, trying to decide how to handle our children’s education for the upcoming school year, or heading to the grocery store with our masks, we’re keenly aware of how this virus is affecting us. It’s impacting our Google searches, too. Questions like “What are the symptoms of COVID-19?” and “Are temperature checks really effective in preventing the spread of the coronavirus?” are popping up everywhere. That’s why we wanted to show you how you can make a COVID-19 quiz.
I do want to begin this post with a caveat. Interact is known for lead generation. We help our clients get potential clients or customers for their businesses with quizzes. Before you develop your quiz, be aware of the situations and the hardships your potential customers are facing and remember your business.
During the current pandemic, many businesses are effectively marketing to their customers by helping them solve a pressing problem they’re facing. This doesn’t mean that the marketers are exploiting the situation or trying to capitalize on the situation in the United States or around the world. It means they are empathetic; they’re recognizing what’s going on in their customers’ lives and are working to help them solve those problems.
It’s important to remember that not every business should create a coronavirus symptoms quiz. If you’re a fashion blogger, you don’t need to create that type of quiz. It’s outside of your expertise and probably wouldn’t be the most effective way to reach your ideal customer.
But, if a COVID-19 quiz makes sense with your business (ie. you’re a medical professional or public health site), you want to create a coronavirus quiz the right way. To help you with that process, we’re discussing:
- Background information on the coronavirus, the symptoms, treatments, and CDC / WHO guidelines;
- How you can use quizzes for COVID-19;
- What types of questions to ask in a quiz on COVID-19,
- How to build a coronavirus quiz.
Let’s get started.
What you need to know about COVID-19
To be able to make effective coronavirus quizzes, there’s a lot of information that you need to know. As time passes and new information relating to the virus is discovered, you want to make sure that whatever quiz you choose to create includes current information and recommendations. I’m writing this post in August of 2020, so all research is current to that time.
History of the coronavirus
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that COVID-19 was first detected in Wuhan, China in late 2019. COVID-19 stands for coronavirus disease 2019. Coronaviruses include a wide range of viruses that impact respiratory systems of humans and animals. While many of these viruses look similar to a common cold, some of the more severe versions include SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), and SARS-CoV-2, which is COVID-19.
On January 13, 2020, the first case of the virus was documented outside of China, first in Thailand, and then in other countries around the world. Initially, it spread through people who had traveled abroad, and then through community spread. To combat the increasing numbers of cases worldwide, many countries imposed travel bans, quarantines, and lockdowns of their populations. The measures taken significantly impacted the economies of these countries as businesses tried to balance the public health guidelines and their business needs.
While some of the countries who struggled with COVID-19 in the spring of 2020 managed to flatten the curve and are now able to somewhat ease restrictions without significant spikes in coronavirus cases, other countries continue to struggle to reduce the number of cases. Globally, there have been almost 20 million cases and over 700,000 deaths from COVID-19 since late 2019. All but 12 countries have reported cases of the novel coronavirus, and there is significant scepticism as to whether there are undetected (or unreported) cases within their borders.
Coronavirus symptoms
The list of symptoms of COVID-19 is long and varied. The CDC lists many of the more common symptoms including fever or chills, headaches, difficulty breathing, fatigue, loss of taste or smell, sore throat, nausea, and diarrhea. Many of the people who test positive for COVID-19 experience mild symptoms or are asymptomatic. There are also individuals whose symptoms are so severe that they require hospitalization and more invasive treatments, such as the use of ventilators for breathing assistance.
Symptoms for the new coronavirus can appear anywhere between 2 and 14 days from exposure and contraction. It’s also highly contagious, and the mortality risk is significantly higher for the elderly and those with preexisting medical conditions. To minimize risk of exposure, there are certain recommendations that the World Health Organization (WHO) and the CDC have given. We’ll discuss those further in a bit.
Because COVID-19 is so new, there is limited research on the complications of the virus, as well as the long-term effects on those who get it. According to the Mayo Clinic, some complications include pneumonia, blood clots, heart problems, kidney and liver failure, and other bacterial or viral infections. While many children remain asymptomatic when they catch the coronavirus, some children contract multi-system inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C), which can be fatal.
Just like the virus itself, the long-term effects of COVID-19 can range from mild to severe. Many individuals report extended fatigue and respiratory issues. Some people struggle with confusion, dizziness, and kidney problems. As time passes and more people recover from coronavirus, researchers will complete more studies about the long-term effects of the virus.
Treatments for COVID-19
Like with all viruses, antibiotics aren’t the correct course of treatment for the coronavirus pandemic (antibiotics treat bacterial infections, not viruses). The majority of people who get positive COVID-19 test results will recover without medication. According to Harvard Medical School, there are no existing medical treatments specifically created to prevent it or treat it.
For more severe cases, doctors have used a variety of treatments. As the virus is so new, there is not significant medical research to prove one recommended course of treatment. Some doctors have experienced success using corticosteroids and at least one study has shown that they can reduce the risk of dying from COVID-19. A second treatment that has proven somewhat successful is the use of an antiviral drug, remdesivir. This medication has been used to treat SARS and MERS, and it makes sense that it could be helpful in fighting SARS-CoV-2. Another course of treatment that has been discussed frequently includes the use of chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. While this combination has become highly politicized, it should be noted that neither the American College of Physicians nor the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends using these medications as a course of treatment for people infected with the coronavirus.
Multiple pharmaceutical companies around the world are currently working on vaccinations for COVID-19. In order for a vaccine to get approval from government agencies, there is a process that involves significant research and multiple stages of trials that the company must complete to prove that the vaccines are safe and effective. There are currently 42 vaccines in varying stages of development with a few of them already in human trials. Some of the labs are suggesting that their vaccines will be ready for production by the end of the year.
Public health guidelines to stop the spread of coronavirus
Since there is not currently a viable vaccine for coronavirus, public health organizations, like the CDC, have provided guidelines to help prevent individuals from contracting it. One of the most effective measures to avoid contracting COVID-19 is to avoid large gatherings and stay at home. This is why many countries issued stay-at-home orders in the spring.
Because the virus is considered highly contagious, guidelines recommend social distancing of at least 6 feet when you do have to go out. This is to avoid respiratory particles that are released when someone breathes out. The CDC also recommends the use of a face mask when you’re out in public or around people other than your immediate family as they stop or slow the droplets as we breathe out.
Another recommendation to avoid spreading the coronavirus is frequent handwashing or using a hand sanitizer with at least 70% alcohol when you aren’t able to wash them. Many businesses have implemented frequent cleaning and sanitization with disinfectants of high-contact surfaces to remove any traces of the virus that might be present.
A final recommendation involves quarantining if you have come in contact with anyone who has tested positive for coronavirus or if you’re exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms. While regular temperature checks and self-monitoring can alert many people if they’ve contracted the virus, current recommendations state that you should stay at home for 14 days after close contact with an infected person. We define close contact as spending more than 15 minutes within 6 feet of someone or significant physical contact (touch, hug, kiss, etc).
Now that you know more than you’ve ever wanted to know about covid-19, let’s talk about the types of COVID-19 quizzes you can create.
Types of COVID-19 quizzes
There are two types of quizzes that you can create about the coronavirus. You can create a quiz to check COVID-19 symptoms or a general knowledge quiz about coronavirus. Both can work for certain business models. Plus, there are several ways that you can customize your quiz for your business.
In a COVID-19 self-assessment tool, you can offer the quiz-taker the opportunity to consider their behaviors and check for coronavirus symptoms. You might make this quiz to help individuals decide if they need to see a doctor or get tested for the coronavirus.
You could also use a coronavirus symptom checker for your business to have employees or customers take this assessment before coming to work or attending an in-person meeting. It can help them know if they need to quarantine or see a doctor instead of coming into the business. After completing this type of check, each person can feel that they’re doing what they can to help get the coronavirus outbreak under control.
For general knowledge COVID-19 quizzes, there are different approaches you can take. You could create a quiz that assesses someone’s knowledge of the faqs about coronavirus. You could choose to make a quiz that addresses the misinformation that abounds on social media. Providing thoughtful, research-based information in a nonthreatening way might help clarify some of the confusion that people are experiencing when they see things on social media.
With either of these types of quizzes, there are a few things that you need to do to make a quality coronavirus quiz. When creating this quiz, or any type of health quiz, you should include a medical disclaimer. In your disclaimer, it’s important to include that you do not intend your quiz to diagnose coronavirus (or any other disease) and it should not replace professional medical advice. If quiz-takers have questions or need further assistance, they should talk to medical professionals about their symptoms.
The other thing to consider when creating your quiz about COVID-19 is how much work you’ll have to do to maintain it. Because of the ever-changing situation due to this virus, doctors and researchers are continuing to learn new information. This means that current recommendations could potentially change. You will need to stay current with medical information and guidelines and update your quiz as needed so you’re not adding to the misinformation available.
Questions to ask in your coronavirus quiz
The questions you ask in your quiz depends on what type of quiz you’re creating. While there might be some overlap between the questions on the two types of COVID-19 quizzes, you need to make sure that your questions fit with the goal of your quiz. Let’s look at the questions in each type of quiz individually.
Once we’ve done that, I’ll discuss the steps you need to take to make a quiz for yourself!
COVID-19 symptoms quiz
Since specifically designing this quiz to work as a symptom checker, we should focus the questions on the symptoms of COVID-19. Because some of the symptoms are similar to those of the flu or other respiratory illnesses, it’s a good idea to check the person’s exposure to coronavirus. You can do this with a simple question, such as “Have you been exposed to someone who has tested positive for the novel coronavirus?” If they answer yes, you know they’re more likely to have the virus. If they answer no, there’s less of a chance they have it, but they’re still not feeling well. They should be able to continue with the quiz to check their symptoms.
For the questions about their symptoms, there are a few ways you could ask these. You can ask them each symptom individually and have them check “Yes” or “No” to indicate if they’re experiencing that question. For example, you might ask “Do you have a fever of 100.4℉ (38℃) or higher?”
You could also set up your question to allow them to choose multiple symptoms. For example, you could ask them “Which of these symptoms are you currently experiencing?” You then offer a list of symptoms for COVID-19. Because there are so many symptoms, and they fall into many different categories, it’s a good idea to group alike symptoms together. Not only does it minimize the chance that quiz-takers will miss a symptom they’re experiencing, it also provides for a better quiz-taking experience. When someone sees a list of 15+ symptoms that they have to look through, it can be a little overwhelming!
You could group your symptoms into categories like respiratory issues, body aches, digestive issues, and others. You could also differentiate between mild, moderate, and severe symptoms. However you set it up, you want to make sure the questions make it easy for the quiz-taker to self-assess.
Coronavirus general knowledge quiz
With a general knowledge quiz, you have options in how you set it up. You could use multiple choice questions, such as “Which of the following are recommendations from CDC to slow the spread of COVID-19?” People can then choose from multiple options like A) Wear a mask over your nose and mouth, B) Stay 15 feet away from people in public, C) Wash your hands for 20 seconds, or D) Avoid social gatherings of people outside of your immediate family.
You could also do a quiz with true/false questions or ask any question related to coronavirus. They might be trivia questions like “New Jersey currently has the highest mortality rate from COVID-19 in the US with over 175 deaths per 100,000 population.” (That’s true, if you were wondering.) You could also focus your questions on myths about coronavirus. It’s also possible to intermix true statements with false, common beliefs about coronavirus. You might include a statement like “I wear a mask to stop me from getting COVID-19.” That statement is actually false, because a mask is more effective at reducing the spread of your respiratory particles than preventing other people’s particles from getting to you.
Now that you’re aware of the types of questions you can ask in your quiz, let’s talk about how to set up your coronavirus quiz!
How to set up a coronavirus quiz
Because I’ve discussed two different types of quizzes, I’m going to walk you through the process of setting up two types of quizzes. For the COVID-19 symptoms checker, I’m going to create a scored quiz with branching logic. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. I’m going to explain what branching logic is and exactly how to set it up! For the general knowledge quiz, you could do a scored quiz or an assessment quiz. I’m going to show you how to set up an assessment quiz, because I think it’s helpful to show the correct answers.
Coronavirus symptom checker setup
To get started on your quiz, go into the Interact dashboard and choose Create New Quiz. You can either Create from Scratch or Use a Template. In the templates, you can choose the Health and Fitness category to get templates that most closely relate to your symptoms quiz.
I chose the high blood pressure quiz template, but any of the templates work. Because they’re completely customizable, you can add or take away questions as needed.
This quiz is currently an Assessment quiz, so I’ll need to change that. When you open the quiz, you can choose “Change Quiz Type” at the bottom left. When the three quiz types open in the popup menu, change it to Scored. You will have to confirm that you want to switch and are ok with deleting the answer correlations.
Once you’ve done that, you can start creating your quiz. My first step is to change the cover to match my quiz. Notice how I added a title that identifies what my quiz is about and added the medical disclaimer to the description. You want to make sure that people know you aren’t a medical professional (unless you are) and that you aren’t their medical professional (unless you are 😉)!
After you’ve finished the cover for the quiz, you can move on to the questions. I know that I want to use conditional or branching logic to more accurately assess the symptoms. What that means is my first question asks the quiz-taker whether they have been in contact with someone with coronavirus. If they answer Yes or Unsure, they’ll move on to one question. If they choose no, they’ll move to a different question. While the questions may look the same, they’ll end up with a different answer at the end of the quiz.
Branching logic
Because I want to use branching logic in my quiz, I have to turn it on. When I click on Questions in the left column, I see a toggle switch to turn on branching logic. Toggling the switch then activates a warning that using branching logic negates the answer settings, so I’ll have to manually assign each answer instead of it being done automatically.
The actual branching should be done after you’ve set up all of the questions and answers, so create those first. My quiz is only going to have 5 questions. They are:
- Have you been in contact with anyone who has tested positive for COVID-19 in the past 14 days?
- Do you have a fever of over 100.4℉?
- Are you exhibiting any of the following symptoms? Choose all that apply.
- What about these symptoms? You can choose any of them.
- If you had to rate the severity of your symptoms on a scale of 1 to 5 with 1 being mild and 5 being severe, what would you choose?
After I’ve added my questions, answers, and results, it’s time to work on the logic. It is helpful to write out the logic before you set it up.
For my results, I have one answer where they probably don’t have coronavirus because they haven’t been in contact with anyone with it. One answer is they might not have it because they aren’t exhibiting any symptoms. Another answer suggests they might have it because they’re exhibiting mild symptoms. They should get tested. My final answer is they probably have it and need to get medical attention immediately because their symptoms are severe.
My logic mapping shows that if they choose no to the question that asks about being in contact with someone with coronavirus, they go through questions that then lead to the result they probably are not infected. If they have been in contact with someone with a positive test result or are unsure if they have it, they get asked about a fever. With a no fever answer, they get taken on a path asking about their symptoms. For those people that choose none of the symptoms, they eventually end up at “they might not be infected with coronavirus,” but they should look for symptoms.
If they have a fever and they’re exhibiting symptoms, there are two possible answers. It depends on the severity of the symptoms. If they’re severe, they probably have it and they need medical assistance immediately. For those with mild symptoms, they might have it but they should probably get a test done. I also include severe symptoms to watch out for. That way they know when they need to get immediate medical assistance.
So, my branching logic looks like this:
Notice how each answer gets mapped to the next step question. While each path has the same 5 questions, they lead down different paths to different answers. You want to make sure that your quiz-takers end up in the right spot!
Coronavirus general knowledge quiz
For the general knowledge quiz, some of the steps are the same. I’ll go to the Health and Fitness quiz templates and choose the same quiz template as before. Since I’m planning to create an Assessment quiz, I don’t have to change the quiz type. I can update the quiz title and description and leave the image the same.
After I’ve done that, I’m ready to add my questions. I change the question and the answer choices to what I want to ask in my quiz. I can choose to add true or false questions, multiple choice questions, or both. It’s possible to have multiple correct answers to your questions (except true/false questions).
When I set my answers, there are multiple settings I can adjust. I’m able to select any of the answers that are correct, write an explanation to explain the answers, and decide if I want that explanation displayed immediately after they answer. If I choose to display it immediately, I can customize what it says for “Correct” and “Incorrect” notifications.
I prefer to display the correct answers immediately because then they’re more likely to check the explanation than if I displayed all of the explanations together at the end. It’s also possible to change the colors of the backgrounds, fonts, and buttons of the correct and incorrect answer explanations. You can make your quiz as unique as you want it.
Once you’ve added all of your questions and answers, you’ll need to set your results. You can have different levels depending on how people score. The template that I chose has 3 levels – beginner, intermediate, and expert. All I have to do is adjust the result wording for each and decide if I want the number correct displayed on the results page. Like the answer settings, you can choose if you want the correct answers and explanations displayed together. For a scored quiz, it automatically splits the total number of questions evenly (or as close to evenly as possible) between the results.
Once you take care of all your results, you finish your quiz. You can decide if you want to turn on lead generation to use your quiz to build your email list. You can also adjust your settings for your social share and share your quiz everywhere!
If you need more help with any of those things, check out Everything You Need to Know to Launch Your First Quiz.
Recap
Congratulations, you made it! You now have everything you need to make a COVID-19 quiz for your business. Whether you decide to create a symptoms quiz or a general knowledge quiz about coronavirus, you’re ready. To review, we discussed:
- Background info about coronavirus, including the history, symptoms, treatments, and CDC guidelines;
- Different ways that you can use COVID-19 quizzes;
- The various types of questions to ask in a quiz on coronavirus, and
- 2 ways to build a coronavirus quiz.
We can’t wait to see the quality quiz you build to help your audience through this challenging time. Good luck!