  This paper introduces a lossless data compression competition that benchmarks
solutions (computer programs) by the compressed size of the 44,981 concatenated
SARS-CoV-2 sequences, with a total uncompressed size of 1,339,868,341 bytes.
The data, downloaded on 13 December 2020, from the severe acute respiratory
syndrome coronavirus 2 data hub of ncbi.nlm.nih.gov is presented in FASTA and
2Bit format. The aim of this competition is to encourage multidisciplinary
research to find the shortest lossless description for the sequences and to
demonstrate that data compression can serve as an objective and repeatable
measure to align scientific breakthroughs across disciplines. The shortest
description of the data is the best model; therefore, further reducing the size
of this description requires a fundamental understanding of the underlying
context and data. This paper presents preliminary results with multiple
well-known compression algorithms for baseline measurements, and insights
regarding promising research avenues. The competition's progress will be
reported at \url{https://coronavirus.innar.com}, and the benchmark is open for
all to participate and contribute.
