The Belle II experiment has successfully completed the operation in the first half of 2020 as originally scheduled, despite the world-wide COVID-19 situation. Since this difficult situation restricted business trips from abroad and even inside Japan, we managed to run the experiment by collaborating with remote and on-site researchers through online tools. Necessary on-site works at KEK also continued with the most careful attention to infection prevention. Although such situation was unprecedented for a large-sized international collaboration with more than 1,000 researchers, many contributions from collaborators around the world led to its successful operation.

During the first half of 2020, SuperKEKB achieved the world highest luminosity of 2.40×10³⁴ cm^-2 s^-1.   In addition, the Belle II detector has also achieved 84% data taking efficiency. The total data of 74 fb^-1 was accumulated so far.

We had to operate the SuperKEKB/Belle II experiment with a very limited number of people in the local experimental site. Therefore, the Belle II Collaboration presented the Belle II Special Award as an acknowledgement of their efforts to the researchers who stayed at KEK and sustained the local operations.
From N-lab, the following six researchers received the award.
        Prof. Toru Iijima, Project Associate Prof. Kodai Matsuoka, Project Assistant Prof. Qidong Zhou
        Genta Muroyama, Yuki Sue, and Kazuki Kojima
The other N-lab Belle II members also played an equally important role in shifts and detector operations from remote to support Belle II operation strongly.

One of the recipient, Mr. Sue, commented as follows.