One thing we’re not going to do is go into lockdown every year (or even go into what passed for lockdown in the United States, which in reality was not). This, the public-health experts I spoke with for this story all agreed, would be neither feasible nor desirable. Broad restrictions on travel and large indoor gatherings, they said, also seem like nonstarters (though Seema Lakdawala, a flu-transmission expert at the University of Pittsburgh, suggested that companies might consider rescheduling their annual holiday party for the summer and moving it outdoors). Even more moderate capacity limitations, though beneficial from a health perspective, Popescu told me, are “tricky for business.”

Still, perhaps other, targeted versions of the restrictions deployed during the pandemic could work. Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech, proposed a sort of “circuit breaker” system, in which schools and workplaces could go remote for a week or two to slow flu transmission during severe local outbreaks. Before shutdowns kick in, people could keep a close eye on flu cases in their area—just as many have monitored COVID numbers over the past two years—and make their own personal risk assessments. For one person, Lakdawala imagines, that might mean being more efficient in a crowded grocery store; for another, masking at a movie theater. (That said, people tend to be less than perfect at gauging the danger of different situations.)

Masks, in theory, are one of the simplest pandemic-times interventions to hold on to. They are “the low-hanging fruit,” says the Emory University immunologist Anice Lowen, because, unlike shutdowns or restrictions on indoor gatherings, they don’t disrupt our daily routines. In an ideal world, several epidemiologists told me, people would mask in crowded indoor spaces during flu season—if not all the time, then at least when case counts are on the rise. If that became the norm, Marr told me, “we would see huge reductions in colds and flus. No question.”