The management of public health and the preparedness for health emergencies partly rely on the collection and analysis of surveillance data, which become crucial in the context of an emergency such as the pandemic caused by COVID-19. For COVID-19, typically, numerous national and global initiatives have been set up from this perspective. Here, we propose to develop a shared vision of the country-level outbreaks during a pandemic, by enhancing, at the international scale, the foundations of the analysis of surveillance data and by adopting a unified and real-time approach to monitor and forecast the outbreak across time and across the world. This proposal, rolled out as a web platform, should contribute to strengthen epidemiological understanding, sanitary democracy as well as global and local responses to pandemics.