A number of questions and challenges that arose in the COVID-19 pandemic appear similar to those experienced during the 2009 influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 pandemic. However, information sharing by scientists was faster in 2020, also facilitated by international organisations, widespread social media use and policies of a number of scientific journals, including Eurosurveillance, that enabled fast-tracking of peer-reviewed articles, publishing of articles already deposited in pre-print servers, and making articles open access. In particular, the global initiative on sharing all influenza data (GISAID) has allowed organisations like nextstrain.org to collectively perform analysis in almost real time.