Mobility restrictions for the control of epidemics: When do they work?

Baltazar Espinoza; Carlos Castillo-Chavez; Charles Perrings

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0235731

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionApril 6, 2020
12 May 2020 Decision Letter - Chris T. Bauch, Editor PONE-D-20-09885 Mobility restrictions for the control of epidemics: When do they work? PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Espinoza, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Jun 26 2020 11:59PM. When you are ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. 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If the figures are no longer to be included as part of the submission please remove all reference to them within the text. Additional Editor Comments (if provided): [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Partly Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: N/A Reviewer #2: N/A ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: First, the figures need to be made according to the standards of PLOS one. For instance, some figures have no axis-labels and not tick labels. Please revise all graphs. Second, while the supporting information are not part of the main text, but they provide an important part of the manuscript and I find it replete of mathematical typos that makes it difficult to read and might affect the quality of the paper. Please revise it carefully. While the results of the manuscript are computationally sound, I find the authors mention sanitation, trade and culture difference in many places in the manuscript while they are not explicitly incorporated in the model. Lack of their incorporation leads me to find that the results are not surprising to some degree. The reason is that the authors, assume that when an individual from one community spends some time in the other community,he/she will have the undergo the transmission rate of the new community. That is counter to the statement of the influence of personal sanitation (since it is face-to-face transmission) and culture influence as they will not change over small periods of time and if they do, they will be carried over to the other community. Thus, that would lead mathematically to a force of infection on those individuals and, for instance, smaller size of epidemics in the HRC's. More explicit modeling might be required to clear that up. Reviewer #2: Please find comments to the author attached. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files to be viewed.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email us at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: PaperReview_tex.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235731.r001
Revision 1
3 Jun 2020 Author Response We carefully reviewed each of the comments made by the reviewers and made edits to the manuscript. The comments and suggestions made by the reviewers addressed key aspects of our study, we feel that our manuscript is much improved now and we thank the reviewers for their helpful comments. We have addressed each point and made changes to our manuscript in blue. The reviewer’s comments are addressed below. - Comments from journal: 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE’s style requirements, including those for file naming. Response: Thank you. We made edits to the manuscript to ensure that it holds PLOS ONE’s journal standards. 2. Please upload a copy of Figures 1 to 4, to which you refer in your text. If the figures are no longer to be included as part of the submission please remove all reference to them within the text. Response: Thank you. We have edited all the figures according to the PLOS ONE’s journal standards. - Comments from reviewer #1: 1. First, the figures need to be made according to the standards of PLOS one. For instance, some figures have no axis-labels and not tick labels. Please revise all graphs. Response: Thank you. We have edited all the figures according to the PLOS ONE’s journal standards. 2. Second, while the supporting information are not part of the main text, but they provide an important part of the manuscript and I find it replete of mathematical typos that makes it difficult to read and might affect the quality of the paper. Please revise it carefully. Response: Thank you for the comment. We have reviewed the formulas and fixed the typos in the SI Appendix. In addition we decided to move the section “Disease Dynamics in Homogeneous Risk Communities” to the body of the manuscript since we think the it complements the structure of the main text. 3. While the results of the manuscript are computationally sound, I find the authors mention sanitation, trade and culture difference in many places in the manuscript while they are not explicitly incorporated in the model. Lack of their incorporation leads me to find that the results are not surprising to some degree. The reason is that the authors, assume that when an individual from one community spends some time in the other community, he/she will have the undergo the transmission rate of the new community. That is counter to the statement of the influence of personal sanitation (since it is face-to-face transmission) and culture influence as they will not change over small periods of time and if they do, they will be carried over to the other community. Thus, that would lead mathematically to a force of infection on those individuals and, for instance, smaller size of epidemics in the HRC’s. More explicit modeling might be required to clear that up. Response: Thank you. We recognize human behavior as an important factor driving disease dynamics and, that it differs on distinct environments, modifying the local risk of infection on visitors. Although it is not explicitly formulated in the manuscript, community components - sanitation, trade and culture, income, education, health-care access, cultural practices, and so on - are assumed to produce differences in the community-specific risk of infection (\\beta_i). Therefore, impacting the community-specific disease dynamics and, in the presence of mobility, the global disease dynamics and the final epidemic size. In other words, we recognize the risk of infection is highly affected by the community-specific characteristics. For instance, we assume that an individual visiting the New York’s neighborhoods of Queens or Brooklyn, experiences a high COVID-19 risk of infection during the visiting time. The proposed model takes in account this former component, envisioning a likelihood of infection tied to the community-specific characteristics. For clarification, we included in the manuscript the following sentence: “We recognize that human behavior is an important determinant of disease dynamics, and that behavior differs across environments, either ameliorating or exacerbating the impact of the local risk of infection on visitors. Moreover, we also recognize that the risk of infection is strongly influenced by community-specific characteristics that alter local and global disease dynamics. It is assumed that the community-specific infection risk reflects community attributes that include income, education, health-care access, cultural practices, and so on.” Lines 121-127. - Comments from reviewer #2: 1. The Lagrangian approach used for modeling the movement between two populations results in entire population of high-risk community spending sometime in low risk community. This seems very unlikely and limits the applicability of their results. For example, authors discuss how at least across national boundaries, epidemics are addressed in a area-specific manner. While it is true, I do not think that their results shed any light on that in current form. Even when there is high mobility across two nations, only a proportion of population will travel and spend time. Response: Thank you for pointing this out. We agree our results hold whenever the traveling population size is comparable to the community population size. Moreover, we agree that such an scenario is very unlikely to occur at the population size of countries. Consequently, we added some lines to clarify that our results are limited to smaller geographical scales. In order to address this comment we replaced the lines discussing about how epidemics are addressed across national boundaries with the following : “The evidence suggests that COVID-19 is overwhelmingly being addressed from the perspective of area-specific risk. Disease control measures are aimed less at reducing the final epidemic size than at containing the disease in particular areas. Our results hold at scales where the traveling population size is comparable to the community population - we address disease dynamics exhibited at the scale of inter-community transmission.” (Lines 293-297) and, “Internationally, however, it is clear that disease control is aimed at the final epidemic size within and not across nation states. In such cases, while the use of mobility restrictions to control disease in particular jurisdictions might increase the overall final epidemic size, it can still lower the country-specific final epidemic size.” (Lines 306-310). 2. It would be great for readers if authors give examples of situations where scenarios illustrated by authors in the manuscript can arise. For example, interactions between richer and poorer regions within a city, such that people from poorer region spend a lot of time in richer region for employment etc. Response: Thank you for suggest this. To complement our manuscript addressing this comment, we have added the following lines: “ Within individual countries there are examples of regions governed by a single health authority but including dramatic differences in living conditions. The Brazilian communities in Rio de Janeiro also known as the “favelas”; the Primrose area neighboring the Makause settlement in Johannesburg, South Africa; the slum populations of Mumbai, India; the Santa Fe neighborhood in Mexico City, Mexico; and the New York neighborhoods of Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan in the USA are all examples of areas where dramatic differences in living conditions coexist within a single public health area. In such cases, disease control might be motivated by the final epidemic size across communities.” (Lines 298-306). Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235731.r002
23 Jun 2020 Decision Letter - Chris T. Bauch, Editor Mobility restrictions for the control of epidemics: When do they work? PONE-D-20-09885R1 Dear Dr. Espinoza, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Chris T. Bauch, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: N/A ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: Thanks for addressing the comment and points I made. Just one small change that might be trivial, on line 95 it would be better to say "health states" rather than "epidemiological states." ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235731.r003
Formally Accepted
26 Jun 2020 Acceptance Letter - Chris T. Bauch, Editor PONE-D-20-09885R1 Mobility restrictions for the control of epidemics: When do they work? Dear Dr. Espinoza: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Professor Chris T. Bauch Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235731.r004

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