A group of health experts is calling for a new national strategy for dealing with respiratory illnesses.
In the New Zealand Medical Journal they say Aotearoa saved 20,000 lives due to the way the country dealt with COVID-19 - and now those lessons should be applied to viruses like influenza (the flu).
We did the scanning, the mask-covering, the vaccinating, and all that isolating.
"All of us feel this terrible COVID-19, we want it to go away," said epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker.
And while this is a COVID-19 story, it also isn't.
What Prof Baker and a group of 15 other leading health experts want, is a streamlined response to all respiratory infections - that includes the flu, RSV, and COVID-19.
Rather than using pandemic-level restrictions, it's about small preventive steps.
"A small number of very sensible precautions that we know will reduce the burden of these serious infectious diseases," Prof Baker told Newshub.
That includes keeping up-to-date with vaccinations, staying at home while sick, and wearing a mask if in a poorly ventilated indoor area.
An integrated approach will only get easier, especially with some anticipated new medical tools.
"The next step will of course be combined vaccines," Prof Baker told Newshub.
"And we will soon have tests that don't just do COVID-19, but [also] do RSV and influenza. These will be self-tests you can do, [but] it's still a little way off," he added.
It's also a time to take stock.
Prof Baker says we managed to save about 20,000 lives in the past three years of the pandemic.
He bases that on deaths we would have seen if we had the same mortality rate as the US.
But experts like Sir Collin Tukuitonga, president of the NZ College of Public Health Medicine, say our response could be improved.
"The next time I would hope we would be on the front foot and we would have an even more robust response to protect everyone," he told Newshub.
"But also some efforts around working more with Māori leaders, Māori communities, Māori providers," he said.
So, have we kept up some of these protections while sick?
"[I] stay home from school if I'm feeling ill, or unwell, and it could spread, but other than that I'm not wearing a mask anywhere," said one woman Newshub spoke to in Auckland.
"If I'm too sick for work then I stay home," one young man said.
"It's gone, COVID's finished!" exclaimed an older man.
"Despite our wish to move on and leave it all behind, it hasn't quite wanted to leave us just yet," Sir Collin said.
So we're left using the lessons from COVID-19 to fight a trio of respiratory illnesses.
