The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic changed the world and many people's lives in countries all over the world in 2020. Much has been written about how writers of fiction have needed to change or shelve their manuscripts to reflect the new state of the world, or to avoid the temporal setting of their stories being impossible to place.
Since so many of these changes have happened so quickly, in the future it may be very hard to pin down a timeline or to figure out who was the first person to get a book published which was really set during the Covid-19 pandemic. I'm hoping that, by asking this question now in 2021 when it should be easier to answer, I'm creating something which will be of value to future historians of literature.
What was the first-published fiction story, in any language, set during Covid-19 lockdown?
Clarifications (more may be added if necessary):
- Any type of story counts, but it must be formally published, not just a blog post or the like which a good writer could do in a day. (For bonus points I'd also be interested in the first novel, or similarly lengthy piece of literature.)
- Any Earth setting is OK, even fictional countries, but there must be a lockdown which affects the lives of the characters. A casual mention of a news story about a virus in far-off China doesn't qualify.