Abstract
Health communicators help promote recommended health behaviors by providing accurate, actionable health information that is easy to read and understand. The COVID-19 public health crisis presents a special challenge to clear health communication because the populations most affected by the virus are those at risk for limited health literacy. We collected 28 consumer COVID-19 materials from the internet using popular search engines. We then assessed the materials for readability, understandability, and actionability using validated tools. Aggregate results suggest that the sample of materials was difficult to read and lacked a number of recommended features that promote a readers’ ability to understand and act upon the information. We present these findings, their implications for health equity, and their limitations and then suggest ways to improve future health communication about time-sensitive infectious diseases.
Highlights
COVID-19 is a respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (Lai et al, 2020), identified in late December of 2019
Using the Flesch-Kincaid, SMOG, and Fry readability formula results obtained from Seven Formulas software, we calculated the mean readability score across the 28-material sample at grade 10, which places the mean in the “difficult” category
Our results are similar to those of previous assessments of health information (Davis et al, 1990; Stossel et al, 2012; Haller et al, 2019; Prince et al, 2019) and suggest that even during a high-stakes public health threat, deficiencies in the quality of consumer health information are common. This is especially concerning given that people in high-risk categories for limited health literacy are the people at high risk of experiencing the worst effects of COVID-19
Summary
COVID-19 is a respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (Lai et al, 2020), identified in late December of 2019. As of June 7, 2020, at the time of this writing, there have been 109,901 US deaths.
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