Influenza will have a hard time being as big a thing as Covid. It much harder to get that viral genome to be as easily transmitted from person to person because of the average minimum number of infectious particles that need to be transmitted. It’s a sloppy, statistical process and you basically need a lot of spit to do it (think small cannon balls flying in a parabolic trajectory through the air). Covid was transmitted much more like a vapor than a spit cannon-ball (spit cannonballs evaporate as they fall and become smaller; eventually these become too dilute to be infectious).