Silence

The pandemic’s horrors are well known to most, but there have been some silver linings. The emptiness of the streets, fewer people driving, and general lack of activity gave us the gift of silence. How silent were many parts of our society?

The silence was very noticeable — I would walk out every morning and stand right next to the bay bridge and hear nothing. You can hear traffic rumbling on the bridge from my apartment on busy mornings, about half a mile away. Obviously, I wasn’t alone in this observation. According to the University of Michigan researchers who analyzed data from the Apple Hearing Study, the environmental noise exposure dropped by half. (The full study is available here.)

University of Michigan’s School of Public Health took noise exposure data from volunteer Apple Watch users in Florida, New York, California, and Texas, and analyzed more than a half-million daily noise