A new approach to characterising infectious disease transmission dynamics from sentinel surveillance: Application to the Italian 2009-2010 A/H1N1 influenza pandemic

► We propose a general statistical framework to fit syndromic and virological data simultaneously. ► Our approach explicitly takes into account the way surveillance data are generated. ► The methodology is applied to surveillance data collected in Italy during the 2009-2010 H1N1 pandemic. ► We find that infants and children were about 3 times more likely to seek healthcare than adults. ► We estimate that R was in the range 1.2-1.4 and the overall AR was 16% according to the Baseline model.