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Comment by barkerja | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it was/is a dud for COVID-19, but there does appear to be many gains from this outside of COVID-19. Infectious diseases that ARE highly transmissible on contact has been dramatically reduced.

Am I suggesting we continue with this level of rigor for cleaning after the pandemic has ended? No. But it does highlight how much "healthier" we can be as a society with a little more emphasis on general hygiene.

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>But it does highlight how much "healthier" we can be as a society with a little more emphasis on general hygiene.

The counter-argument to this is that excessive hygiene also seems to (quite probably) cause health problems [0]. There appears to be some tension between protecting the weak and protecting the herd, so it's not at all clear that this increase in sanitization will ultimately be a net gain for public health (to say nothing of environmental impact).

[0] I leave it to the curious to run a few google scholar searches. "hygiene hypothesis" is a good start, pointing to relationships between excess (or more exactly, a wrong kind of) cleanliness and poor development of the intestinal microbiome.

It almost definitely reduces the spread of flu. I highly doubt it continues post-covid though. Some people seem to love the idea of wearing masks indefinitely though so I think we'll see more of that.

You're definitely right, with the caveats that other posters have pointed out that there might be benefits from less cleaning as well. My big concern isn't that we're cleaning, but that we're cleaning too much and using that as a justification for doing less of anything else.

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