Deciphering the epitope dominance of the natural memory responses seen in recovered patients with COVID-19 will aid vaccine development. In this preprint, Ferretti et al. used an unbiased genome-wide screen (T-Scan) to map the epitopes recognized by memory CD8+ T cells from convalescent patients with COVID-19 with prevalent HLA types. SARS-CoV-2-specific memory CD8+ T cells recurrently targeted a limited set of immunodominant epitopes, which were unique to SARS-CoV-2 and not from highly variable regions. Only 10% of these epitopes corresponded to the S protein, stressing the relevance of developing vaccines that promote T cell responses against other viral targets, such as ORF1ab and N protein.