GISAID

The GISAID Initiative enables the rapid sharing of influenza virus data through a unique sharing mechanism, that was recognized for its importance to global health by all G20 health ministers in 2017. The Initiative involves public-private partnerships between the nonprofit organization Freunde von GISAID e.V. and governments of the Federal Republic of Germany, the official host of the GISAID EpiFluTM database - which provides public access to the most complete collection of genetic sequence data of influenza viruses and related clinical and epidemiological data - Singapore and the United States of America.

Initially spurred by the threat posed by human infections with highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1, GISAID introduced its novel sharing mechanism in 2008 that permits free and open access to influenza data, to anyone who positively identifies himself or herself, and agrees to respect the inherent rights of contributors. GISAID's database access agreement ensures that contributors of virus sequence data do not forfeit intellectual property rights to the data.

GISAID has developed an application to follow the data and genome sequencing of Covid-19. They are working to bring the data together and make it available for others studying and tracking the Covid-19 sequencing and related clinical and epidemiological data. They also track the spread and the phylogeny with visual aids. The data and the mapping are available for download along with the data through GISAID's website.