[Comment] Now is the time to integrate serology into routine infectious disease surveillance

Syndromic and virological surveillance are essential for epidemic intelligence, which can be defined as the capacity to effectively identify, monitor, understand, and forecast infectious disease outbreaks. However, as traditional surveillance systems only detect a small and potentially variable proportion of all infections, they can hardly be used to track the total infection burden and the build-up of immunity. This impedes our ability to understand and forecast epidemic dynamics. In an Article in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Hai Nguyen-Tran and colleagues1 showed how setting up a relatively small serological surveillance scheme in children in the USA could nicely complement traditional surveillance systems.