Routines, breaks and heritages of confinement due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile

<jats:p>The preventive confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic can be conceived as a break that transformed the regular routines of the population from forced permanence in the home and the virtualization of daily life. The study's objective sought to characterize regular routines, pandemic breaks, and re-established routines recognized by the population as heritages of the COVID-19 lockdown period. Exploratory qualitative descriptive research was carried out using focused interviews and photographic images, which provided the information required for a qualitative analysis process by category. The results indicate that regular routines were gradually adapted to the home confinement by shaping the pandemic routines necessary to face the unprecedented break in daily life for health reasons and providing relative safety ranges amid uncertainty. It is concluded that the COVID-19 health emergency was constituted in a break capable of dividing the biographies into cardinal points corresponding to before, during, and after the pandemic, references that lie at the base of regular routines, pandemic routines, and reinstatement of regular routines/ post-pandemic routines, which constitute a sequence in whose deployment the inherited learning from an uncertain and threatening vital period are evident.</jats:p>