Update on the potentially never-ending quiz series

Lots of celebrities die every year, but 2020 was a year when death was on everyone's mind because of the deadliest pandemic since 1918. By the end of the year, just over 1.9 million people had officially died of COVID-19, including 350,000 in the U.S.

As celebrities died during the year, I noticed that a roughly equal number seemed to be dying of COVID-19, cancer, and all other natural causes, and that seemed to be the right number of categories for a multiple choice quiz. Thus, 2020 Celebrity Deaths: COVID, Cancer, or Natural Causes? was born.

I had no intention of creating a celebrity death causes quiz for 2021 with only cancer and natural causes as the options, or some other third category. The "series" would end with the pandemic, and the availability of a vaccine made it unlikely that the rich and famous would be dying of COVID in 2021. And then an odd thing happened... People didn't want to be vaccinated.

By February, I had created the 2021 version of the quiz, and expanded it throughout the year, occasionally bumping someone when someone more famous died. Twelve had seemed like the right number of questions in 2020, so I kept it the same in 2021. Despite the availability of a vaccine, there were twice as many entries for COVID-19 as there had been in 2020! The number of COVID deaths, worldwide, increased to 3.5 million in 2021, while the number in the U.S. increased to 460,000.

In the last week or so of December, Quizmaster started publishing 2021 quizzes, but I set my quiz to publish on January 1, just in case we had a repeat of 2016, when we lost Carrie Fisher on December 27. Sure enough, we lost Betty White on December 31, so I quietly added her to the quiz without having to change it after people had started taking it. Behold, 2021 Celebrity Deaths: COVID, Cancer, or Natural Causes?. The pandemic had lasted long enough to turn my quiz concept into a series.

Towards the end of 2021, most people in the developed world had been vaccinated, and the pandemic seemed to be winding down. And then Omicron showed up and gave the developed world the worst wave yet. I created a 2022 version when Bob Saget died, putting him in the "natural causes" category pending an official cause of death. Still, the quiz would only be published if celebrities died of COVID in 2022, which really shouldn't be happening at this point. This morning I added Meat Loaf for COVID-19 and Louie Anderson for cancer, so already the 2022 edition has one of each.

Nearly a month into 2022, more than 60% of humans have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Nevertheless, millions of people in wealthy countries, who can get vaccinated for free any time they want, still think that the vaccine might be worse for them than the virus, so there is still no end in sight. Celebrity Deaths: COVID, Cancer, or Natural Causes? is already a series. Now the question is how long-running the series will be. Here's hoping that this year's quiz will be the last one.