When South Africa was drawn into the global orbit of the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, it was not only thrust into the unknown, but its policy instruments were tested to the limit. Nevertheless, its welfare regime was already expansionary before Covid-19, with 60% of the national budget being spent on social wages, including the provision of free services to indigent households and social grants to support millions of South Africans (National Treasury, 2023; Ramaphosa, 2023). During the pandemic, one of the policy instruments which was relied upon by the government, to safeguard the lives and livelihoods of South Africans, was social policy. Interestingly, as the pandemic unfolded, social policy was elevated to a more innovative space to tackle the health, socio-economic and other ramifications of Covid-19. This reflective paper ponders on some of the social policy innovations which emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic. Thereafter, it addresses this in comparison to the post Covid-19 era and revisits some of the supposedly temporal measures which were pursued in the said period. By doing so, it re-examines them in the light of the country’s efforts to rebuild itself after the pandemic and considers if they could be deemed as fitting a more structural, long-term welfare state type of reform. The paper then tries to determine whether some of the policy positions carried over from the pandemic can be considered as new policy imperatives. Specifically, the paper addresses the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) ‘Covid’ grant and the Basic Income Grant (BIG).