Airports are a controlled environment where your free will is a lot less meaningful than usual.
I'm quite fond of hand-washing, and I hate airports because they make it so difficult. You have to touch everything, and everything touches you, and sinks are few and far between, and only located in jam-packed restrooms.
You also can't bring decent quantities of hand sanitizer through checkpoints. This ban on liquids and gels applies to alcohol gel, BZK foam, povidone solution, and towelettes premoistened with any of the above. I checked.
Once aboard the plane, there's no effective handwashing. The bathrooms are so small you brush the walls with your shoulders while turning around, the trash-flap has to be shoved on to deposit your paper towel, and the door latch has to be touched to be operated.
After you've arrived at your destination, luggage at the baggage claim has been handled by folks outside your control, who themselves probably don't wash their hands very often, and once you've grabbed it, even if you wipe it down with some towelettes you've squirreled away, there's no restroom nearby to wash the remaining mostly-dead germs off your hands.
So please, tell me which airports you've been flying where handwashing is easy, and I'll try to schedule a connection through one to check it out.
You can do none of these things and be just fine.
You, personally, may not get sick traveling, but your experience is not a solution for a systemic problem, nor is your proposal of doing nothing.
> People routinely get sick when traveling to the point it's basically a trope.
The only version of the trope I've heard of before is eating in foreign 3rd world destinations (eg: Delhi belly). I live in a major tourist destination and if tourists were routinely getting sick out here I'd know about it.
I mean of course one should be washing their hands after using the bathrooom, but all that other stuff you mentioned.. that's anal to the point of obsessive.
Isn't a large value of washing after using the restroom that it means you'll wash your hands multiple times a day when you wouldn't otherwise?
> but all that other stuff you mentioned.. that's anal to the point of obsessive.
Arguments similar to this were used against washing your hands at all when we first developed a theory of germs and contamination.
Really though, this discussion won't progress until one of us has supporting data.
I don't have data to support my conclusions, but I subscribe to the Hygiene Hypothesis... humans have lived in filth for millennia, and our bodies haven't evolved to live in sterile conditions.
This seems like a reasonable place for regulators to step in.