The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has posed several challenges to clinical molecular microbiology laboratories. In particular laboratories have needed to implement change in operations across procurement, collection, logistics, high throughput testing workflows and result reporting. As the pandemic continues, and with the Reff in most states continuing to hover near or above one, current average public sentiment might be argued as that of indifference. Community contribution to transmission minimisation – wearing of masks, social distancing, and effective hand sanitization is diminishing. Data will be presented to show that even when those barriers were prevalent in the community in 2020, Rhinovirus infections were surging. Despite labs achieving historical maximum throughput scenarios, events of November 2021 through January 2022 eventually resulted in failure to meet testing demand. Testing samples exceeded pre-test storage times and were discarded in some states. Throughput capacity strategies leveraging pre-test sample pooling failed in some laboratories as infection rates climbed. The lower sensitivity of some pooling strategies in molecular labs, followed by the entry of Rapid Antigen testing to the market with an even lower sensitivity set a path to higher rates of false negative test results in early infection leading to increases in community transmission events. Following the changes adopted in scaling of SARS-CoV-2 molecular testing are the Australian clinical molecular microbiology laboratories now well placed for delivering high volume influenza testing in event of an overdue pandemic influenza event with severe morbidity? What would the effective response time be to meet demand if the resultant virus had mutations in the commonly utilised target genes of existing commercial assays? How well placed are we for appropriate collection and lab side handling of such samples? What is the tolerance of false negative results from less sensitive testing options in such an event? Thanks to COVID-19 the public arguably now has significantly enhanced knowledge around the transmission mitigation strategies and (supply permitting) would likely be more galvanised in adopting those with circulating high morbidity Influenza.