I've spent my life being the opposite of a germophobe... our house was a menagerie when I was a kid - cats, dogs, rabbits, hamsters - I would handle the creatures, sometimes their turds, and then go eat dinner. Or I'd catch crawdads down at the creek, handle them, toss them back, and then go eat dinner. Handwashing was marginally enforced. I generally avoided it. Pebbles on the ground I'd pick up and suck on. In the sixties, in central KS, there were no shots for childhood diseases except for polio and DPT, and the rest I succumbed to. To this day, I don't use hand sanitizer and am willing to eat stuff that's landed on a dirty floor or the ground. And I am rarely sick, often have minimal symptoms when there's a flu going round. I know many people who tell a similar story - immune system health comes from growing up in intimate contact with the germ universe.
That said, I don't want to pass a nasty bug along to someone vulnerable, so I'm washing my hands after touching public surfaces and I've stopped using drinking fountains. Not being a bottled water fan, I'm now really thirsty when I get home. No biggie. When I go to the supermarket I grab a cart that's been sitting outside in the sun, soaking up UV. On a cloudy day, I wipe down the handle with the towlettes all stores now provide. Etc.
But here's what I see as the real looming health threat: children growing up in weirdly antiseptic conditions, with helicopter parents pushing sanitizer at them, and passing on germophobe memes 24/7. When it's NOT a pandemic. That approach will grow a generation that never develops it's immune system properly and will depend on vaccines for everything. Here's an interesting hypothesis: some infectious disease experts say that the reason "Spanish" Flu largely spared China in 1918 was because it actually came from China and herd immunity was strong there because the local populations had been in contact with various similar strains for centuries.
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5 (45.5%)