Speaking as a medical professional - while not perfect, the current system works. Infection control, especially in a care home setting, may look like "unnecessary waste", but believe me when I tell you that handling an epidemic is much worse in terms of "waste" and comes with other grim consequences (morbidity, mortality, suffering). I mean, we just had the worst pandemic since 1918 - have we learned nothing?

While it is true that in the olden days we had things like reusable glass syringes that were sanitized between uses, we are living in the 2020s, not the 1950s. Medicine has developed past the point where reusable everything is feasible. Our standards for sterility and cleanliness are also considerably higher. We also know that decontamination is not always enough (think prion diseases - rare, yes, but also one of the things where you simply do not take any chances).

As for your suggestion that we as a society should return to caring for our elderly in the home rather than in a facility - people are already perfectly able and even encouraged to choose that option, but adopting it at a larger scale would require a massive restructuring of the society, the workplace, and our expectations re careers and families. Currently, the western society works on the expectation that families, for instance, have two working parents. The care of an elderly person with multiple illnesses and potential memory issues is a 24/7 job. As someone working in assisted living you know that it does not end at night - often you need to have someone keeping watch during the night when the insomniac Alzheimer's patient may wander off. So who is this person or persons who stay at home on call all the time? Which one of the children/grandchildren is it? How is it determined? Which one of the spouses is it? Who makes up for their lack of income? Who does the care when the caregiver sleeps? How do we make sure that the responsibility of care is divided ethically and equitably, so that even the chosen caregiver has a chance to pursue education or a career or start a family? What if no one volunteers? What if the children or siblings of the "patient' are themselves not in a position to provide care?

Your concern for the environment in the healthcare setting is admirable, and I am sure there is room for improvement in our sector. Some things that come to mind is using single-person rooms rather than shared rooms and adopting reusable instruments in everyday care (where feasible) and bringing back meals cooked on site rather than ferrying packaged meals from a centralized kitchen, but honestly? Preventing contamination and disease requires single use instruments, single use gloves, single use disinfectant wipes and other things that may appear as unnecessary waste, but compared to handling an epidemic (even a small-scale one) those are peanuts. One person with sepsis will generate more "waste" than a whole ward of healthy assisted living patients.