PONE-D-20-14011

Potential risk of COVID-19 in adults with chronic conditions because of their perceptions and attitudes: results from a cross-sectional survey nested in the ComPaRe e-cohort

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Tran,

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.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Wen-Jun Tu

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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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

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

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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: No

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

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Reviewer #1: No

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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: This is peer-review of paper by Viet-Thi Tran et al, which determined Potential risk of COVID-19 in adults with chronic conditions because of their perceptions and attitudes in France. They found that those with chronic medical illnesses have skewed views about their likelihood about severe disease with COVID-19.

The strengths of this study are the large sample size.

Major Comments:

1. The survey design was omitted for us as evaluators, who designed it? How? Is it validated? Elaborate more to this. It should be presented in the appendix.

2. The response rate was very low, what was the reason? How did you distribute it?

3. The analysis was mainly descriptive with no interesting associations came out from this survey. Make it more interesting for the readers and researchers.

4. The definition of the high risk of severe illness is not clear and misleading.

5. Why did you divide Perception of risk of severe illness with COVID-19 to four categories? Explain further and make a valid point.

6. Your survey was looking for perception of people but attitude of people was presented and analysed, please be specific about your objectives and don’t confuse the readers.

7. Very limited discussion was presented; no scientific discussion has been done which very important papers were not discussed concerning prevalence, severity and mortality of chronic respiratory conditions, cardiac, renal, and other comorbidities.

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Reviewer #1: No

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PONE-D-20-14011R1

COVID-19–related perceptions, context and attitudes of adults with chronic conditions: results from a cross-sectional survey nested in the ComPaRe e-cohort

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Tran,

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.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 20 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're 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.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Wen-Jun Tu

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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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: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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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

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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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

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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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

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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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: Thank you for the authors for addressing all the comments except ONE, which is number (7. A very limited discussion was presented; no scientific discussion has been done which very important papers were not discussed concerning prevalence, severity and mortality of chronic respiratory conditions, cardiac, renal, and other comorbidities). They need to cite systematic reviews and meta-analysis about the above comorbidities and link that with the current prevalence and severity reported in France. The other important point here is about Attitude, I can not see anything about smoking habits and the risk of getting an infection with those vulnerable group of patients. A recent meta-analysis published by Plos One highlighted the prevalence and severity associated with former, never and current smokers and COVID-19. Please discuss this in your discussion and make a comparison with your results as this definitely ATTITUDE.

Good luck

Reviewer #2: The authors studied the perceptions, context and attitudes of individuals with chronic conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic to clarify their potential risk of infection,the result was that 63% patients felt at risk because of severe illness, about 23.7% were at risk of infection, at the end they concluded that individuals with chronic conditions have distorted perceptions of their risk of severe illness with COVID-19.So I will give some comments as followings.

In this study, the investigation time period was selected from 3.23-4.2. I want to konw the reason for choosing this study time? Why not choosing a longer period of time or another time period?

In this study, how to define a serious disease state? What types of diseases are included? Whether different disease types will affect the conclusions of this investigation

In the face of the COVID-19 epidemic, what are the current policy measures adopted by the French government?

The following references should be discussed in the revision text.

Cao JL, Hu XR, Tu WJ., & Liu Q. (2020). Clinical Features and Short-term Outcomes of 18 Patients with Corona Virus Disease 2019 in Intensive Care Unit. Intensive Care Medicine, DOI: 10.1007/s00134-020- 05987-7.

Cao JL, Tu WJ, Hu XR, & Liu Q. (2020). Clinical Features and Short-term Outcomes of 102 Patients with Corona Virus Disease 2019 in Wuhan,China. Clinical Infectious Diseases,DOI: 10.1093/cid/ciaa243/ 5814897.

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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

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.]

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 PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

COVID-19–related perceptions, context and attitudes of adults with chronic conditions: results from a cross-sectional survey nested in the ComPaRe e-cohort

PONE-D-20-14011R2

Dear Dr. Tran,

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.

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Kind regards,

Wen-Jun Tu

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: