Personally, I expect to walk straight to the sink and wash my hands, as soon as I get indoors, for the rest of my life.

That's what I've always done my entire life even before the virus - the outside is gross (basic things like knowing people use the washroom and don't wash their hands and then touch knobs you do, etc). How did you not?

...which, if it turns into a cultural habit, will both protect against getting infected but also make future humans more susceptible to diseases since their immune systems have not had enough exposure. It might also lead to an increase in allergies, as can already be seen in the higher prevalence of such in modern clean suburban housing projects versus the countryside. A bored immune system will find other things to attack, including harmless agents or even the body it is part of.

Incredible that it takes a global pandemic for people to care about hygiene lol

There were no significant threats in the West before corona to justify high level of hygiene. How many people does the average person know who died of something preventable with good hygiene?

Secondly, increased hygiene has it's own set of problems. You dont kill just corona, you also kill the countless harmless pathogens, but who are important to keep your immune system on its toes. Its suspected that the reason there are so many allergic persons in the West lately it's the increasingly sanitized world around us.

I'm right with you -- I used to only wash my hands when I felt like I could've touched something gross, or when using the bathroom. And before cooking for other people. It wasn't something I really thought of too often.

Now, anytime I do anything, I wash my hands. Feels weird not to. Don't know if that is ever going away since I'm doing it instinctually already now

...and you didn't do that already? I'm not being funny, but since I was a little kid I was always taught that as soon as you get home you take off your shoes and go wash your hands. I actually do the same at work where the first thing I do is go wash my hands after arriving at the office. I think I assumed everyone did the same already.

A lot of people wear their shoes on their bed and don’t wash their hands after using the restroom. Sadly, I think your assumption is off the mark :(

I think it is totally futile to try to predict these things. Of course, making pronouncements as in the original post is insane, but enough people delight in this misery to put it on the front page of HN.

I’ve been thinking along these lines, but with a twist. I’m half British and half Italian, raised and resided in the latter most of my life. As I’m sure you know, both of these countries have been hit very severely by the pandemic, and Italy in particular is probably the epitome of the “hard lockdown” — or at least, it’s been one of the more prominent cases because it was the first Western country to make that move and the example everybody else seems to have drawn inspiration from. People are clearly very deeply affected on all levels by this. People have been locked indoors for, well, months now and society has become more regimented than it had ever been. Italians, a stereotypical gregarious population (though that of course varies from person to person and has some regional variation — I’m from the slightly less personally expansive North) have become accustomed to wearing masks in public and keeping strict distances from one another. ‘Touchy-feely’ has been revised to standoffish. There’s reports of people having panic attacks if they see somebody without a mask. Stuff like that (of course it’s hard to tell how prevalent that is, because broadcast & social media tend to blow such episodes out of all proportion).

And now for the twist: as chance would have it, I am working in Malta (a small independent island off the bottom of Sicily, the EU’s smallest member state), so I’m actually abroad in this crucial time and experiencing a very ‘light’ experience: 440 or so cases on a population of half a million, three or four confirmed deaths. We’ve been in a “light lockdown” since sometime in late march. People basically started working from home of their own initiative and/or businesses decided to implement this ahead of governmental recommendations to that effect; bars, restaurants, and non-essential shops are shut and those that are considered essential admit only a few people at the time. People largely give each other a wider berth and aren’t seen congregating in more than the governmentally mandated three people per cluster, but it’s all rather lax, and seems to have worked (fortunately).

So I can’t help but speculate about how odd everything will seem when I will finally go back to visit Milan: everybody back there has gone through a perspective-altering collective trauma that I haven’t experienced. I can imagine myself ending up doing something that has suddenly become a faux pas (or at the very least outmoded) such as putting forward my hand to give a shake, or something gauche such as (comparatively) ‘looming’ over somebody in a queue. I’m quite disturbed by this prospect, to be very honest. There might also be a bit of “survivor guilt” rolled in too (by a quirk of chance, I avoided the ordeal everybody else had to go through).

We’re not five months into the Twenties yet and things are definitely very different from what I had anticipated.

Islands and countries such as Australia are having a completely different experience, as they can track incoming cases and with good quarantine practices genuinely create a safe bubble for all residents. Watch what happens with New Zealand, Iceland and other small islands like yours and the Canaries etc - you'll be out of lockdown while everyone agrees to be very strict on what enters the country, something continental countries can't do.

Yes, the lockdown procedures have been successful and the disease is definitely on a downward trend (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/malta/)

That kind of underscores my point, though, doesn’t it: I’ve had a very atypical experience compared to those of my compatriots (on both sides, Britain being an island but having massively bungled its management in the early stages). I’ve been working from home for six weeks and endure the annoyance of joining a short and diffuse queue to get into the local convenience store, and am at liberty to take a daily stroll in excess of a dozen kilometres; they’ve had their whole existence disrupted (they’ve lost jobs) and loved ones (I recently graduated from “know people who’ve lost their job because of this” to “know people who’ve lost a relative because of this”). It’s truly horrifying, and I’ve experienced it only vicariously, from afar.

Can we go in and out of Malta, if yes how ?

No we can’t: commercial (passenger) flights were suspended on 20th march and though there’s various repatriation schemes running in both directions (in and out), pretty much everything is suspended.

It’s better if you abide by official sources though: https://www.maltairport.com/notifications/travel-advice-coro...

First, rude.

Second, yes, three months of heavily restricted movement, limited access to resources (from flour to dental care), to knowing people who are sick, dying, or at high risk has absolutely changed my perspective.

Knowing that we've got several more months of this ahead, this is a significant portion of our lives. One way to think about it is that most of us will have spent whole integer percentage of our lives in this situation. Of course that's going to impact the way we observe and interact with the world.