Opening Brazilian COVID-19 patient data to support world research on pandemics

This paper describes the COVID-19 DataSharing/BR initiative, a pioneer public-private
partnership to publish open data on Brazilian COVID-19 patients. Constructed in record time, it
has been launched with clinical, laboratory and diagnostic data from  approximately 177,000 Brazilian
individuals, in answer to researchers’ demand for quality data. COVID-19 DataSharing/BR was
created by a consortium led by FAPESP (Sao Paulo Research Foundation) and USP (University
of Sao Paulo, Brazil), with participation from three major private health institutions in Brazil –
Fleury Institute, Sírio-Libanês Hospital and Albert Einstein Hospital. Launched on July 1st, 2020,
within 10 days it had already been subject to 800 downloads from 14 different countries.This
text provides a brief description of the initiative, and initial efforts for preprocessing and
publishing the data according to legal and interoperability constraints. The COVID-19
DataSharing/BR repository took only one month from inception to delivery, thanks to the support
of a pre-existing extensible open research data e-infrastructure.