Australia and much of the Western Pacific Region has transitioned only relatively recently from a low or no burden COVID-19 state to experiencing widespread community transmission. As our region learns to live with COVID-19 we continue to be faced with new challenges for disease control, and an ever-shifting evidence landscape. We must prepare for a predictably unstable transition to an ‘endemic’ state, while anticipating the emergence of new variants with potential to produce large surges in infection numbers and disease burden. Globally, management objectives are refocusing on population resilience, while retaining response readiness. I will discuss the ways in which mathematical and computational models provide useful frameworks to enable synthesis of all that we have learned and continue to discover about this pathogen, to better prepare for plausible futures with immunisation and other measures.