Comparison of Readability of Official Public Health Information About COVID-19 on Websites of International Agencies and the Governments of 15 Countries

Among all 18 websites evaluated, information about COVID-19 uniformly exceeded the recommended reading level of grades 6 through 8 (Table ). All pages (n = 149) drawn from the websites scored above 8.0 by at least 1 metric, and 141 (95%) scored above 8.0 by all 5 metrics. A total of 145 pages (97%) exceeded the syntactic complexity typical for text written at a grade 8 level (mean length of clause, 8.0; dependent clauses per T-unit, 0.2). Across all CDC pages, the median FKGL was 11.0 (interquartile range IQR, 3.2; range, 5.4-16.6).