Covid-19 has Made Hospitals Unbearably Loud

It’s a big and noisy problem

Elad Simchayoff
Medium Coronavirus Blog

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Photo: Hush Naidoo/Unsplash

Anyone who’s been at a hospital knows it’s a loud place. A constant beeping sound coming from various machines, an underlying chatter, the occasional cough or cry, the buzzing hiss of fluorescent lights.

The guidelines made by WHO are very clear. A hospital’s noise level should be “as low as possible”. The suggested level is set at 30 dB LAeq, which is equivalent to a quiet rural area, one-sixteenth as loud as a vacuum cleaner. That’s very quiet. It never happens.

An English study conducted in 2008 found that the noise level in a hospital surgical ward reached 95.6 dB. That’s louder than a supermarket, a shopping center, or a coffee shop and similar to the noise of a heavy truck.

Another British study, this one from 2018, found a staggering noise level of over 100 dB in intensive care units. Similar to loud music heard through headphones, it is a point at which ear cells could be damaged.

“It’s very hard to get used to”, Dr. Aharon Bolshinski from the Wolfson Medical Center in Israel said of noise on the podcast “One a Day”. “It causes headaches and stress,” he added. The loud noise that accompanies hospital wards is not just a nuisance, studies have shown that it affects communication, causes annoyance, irritation, and…

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