PONE-D-20-14093

Fear Control and Danger Control Amid COVID-19 Dental Crisis: Application of the Extended Parallel Process Model

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Bashirian,

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.

With your revised draft, please pay special attention to all reviewers' comments, and revise your paper in accordance with PLOS ONE's Guidelines for Authors. Please remember that an insufficiently revised draft must lead to outright reject.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 06 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,

Andrej M Kielbassa, Prof. Dr. med. dent. Dr. h. c.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. Please include additional information regarding the survey or questionnaire used in the study and ensure that you have provided sufficient details that others could replicate the analyses.

For instance, if you developed a questionnaire as part of this study and it is not under a copyright more restrictive than CC-BY, please include a copy, in both the original language and English, as Supporting Information.

3.PLOS requires an ORCID iD for the corresponding author in Editorial Manager on papers submitted after December 6th, 2016. Please ensure that you have an ORCID iD and that it is validated in Editorial Manager. To do this, go to ‘Update my Information’ (in the upper left-hand corner of the main menu), and click on the Fetch/Validate link next to the ORCID field. This will take you to the ORCID site and allow you to create a new iD or authenticate a pre-existing iD in Editorial Manager. Please see the following video for instructions on linking an ORCID iD to your Editorial Manager account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xcclfuvtxQ

 

[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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

Reviewer #3: No

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

**********

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

Reviewer #3: No

**********

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: No

Reviewer #3: No

**********

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: Dear Authors

See the attached comments on the PDF file. These all are for the improvement and betterment of this manuscript with latest information.

Extract information from the below papers in the manuscript;

a) Peng, Xian, et al. "Transmission routes of 2019-nCoV and controls in dental practice." International Journal of Oral Science 12.1 (2020): 1-6.

b) Ahmed, M.A.; Jouhar, R.; Ahmed, N.; Adnan, S.; Aftab, M.; Zafar, M.S.; Khurshid, Z. Fear and Practice Modifications among Dentists to Combat Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2020, 17, 2821.

c) Khurshid, Zohaib, Faris Yahya Ibrahim Asiri, and Hamed Al Wadaani. "Human saliva: non-invasive fluid for detecting novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV)." International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17.7 (2020): 2225.

Also, improve and double check your references.

Reviewer #2: I have been pleased to review this interesting paper, "Fear Control and Danger Control Amid COVID-19 Dental Crisis: Application of the Extended Parallel Process Model". The topic is important nowadays and the authors provide an interesting aspect to it, through usage of the extended parallel process model.

However, I have several comments that need to be answered.

1. The compliance rate of this cross-sectional survey seems to be approx. 34%. Can the authors explain such compliance rate?

2. English editing and proofing of the manuscript should be performed, e.g. in the discussion "Participants with higher previous work experiencewere (experience were) more efficient" etc.

3. The authors refer to "The centers for disease control and prevention (CDC) the national association of dentists strongly advise dentists to discontinue unnecessary dental treatments during the epidemic period and not to treat or examine people suspected of having the disease in regular dental clinics (15, 16). However, there is no information regarding the instructions given in Iran. What were the instructions provided by the local dental board? Were dentists instructed to continue with elective dental care or provide emergency treatments only? It could be useful to add such information to the discussion.

4. What were the exact dates of survey conductance in March 2020?

5. What was the scope (e.g. number of COVID-19 cases and deaths per capita) of the COVID-19 pandemic in Iran during the survey date of conductance? It could be useful to add such information to the discussion.

6. Up to date, several studies regarding dentists' psychological distress and self-efficacy in the COVID-19 era. The authors should relate to such up-to-date studies (e.g.

Shacham, M., Hamama-Raz, Y., Kolerman, R., Mijiritsky, O., Ben-Ezra, M., & Mijiritsky, E. (2020). COVID-19 factors and psychological factors associated with elevated psychological distress among dentists and dental hygienists in Israel. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(8), 2900.

Consolo, U., Bellini, P., Bencivenni, D., Iani, C., & Checchi, V. (2020). Epidemiological Aspects and Psychological Reactions to COVID-19 of Dental Practitioners in the Northern Italy Districts of Modena and Reggio Emilia. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(10), 3459.)

7. "a text message invitation to take a survey was sent". How was it sent? WhatsApp? Were participants contacted more than once?

8. Some parts of the questionnaire has very low number of items, e.g. perceived sustainability, along with internal reliability values rated as good. These should be added to the limitations of the study.

9. In what language was the survey conducted? English, Arabic, Farsi, other?

10. Were the questions adopted from previous validated questionnaires?

11. "Significance level in all tests was considered at p<0.05". Perhaps the authors meant consideration at p≤0.05? Since in the results several parameters were

12. "The proportion of high efficacy was significantly higher is employees with more than 5-years of previous work experience (P=0.04) and those older than 30 years of age (P=0.08)." "more than other categories (P=0.055)." How come P=0.08 and P=0.55 are considered significant, if values were considered significant <0.05?

Reviewer #3: Abstract

- English remains a concern. Please revise for language shortcomings, to facilitate reading. See, for example, "procedres".

- "(...) and high efficacy towards coronaviruse disease, respectively." Meaning is unclear, please revise.

- "The proportion of high efficacy was significantly higher (...)." Meaning remains unclear.

- "Data identified that those oral health care providers that were on the risk control response (...)." Again, what is risk control response?

- "(...) adopted preventive behaviors more strictly r than those on fear control response." Check sentence, and clarify the term "fear control response".

Intro

- Meaning ov "observaning"?

- Again, please revise for a clear language. Provide complete sentences. Note that the current draft must be thoroughly revised, and help of a native speaker is strongly encouraged. With the numerous (co-)authors of the current submission, quality of the submitted manuscript clearly would seem questionable. Remember that ALL authors must have read (and should have revised) this submitted draft.

- "In infectious disease 89 epidemic campaigns, main focus is on motivating fear." Meaning would seem unclear. Who motivates fear? Provide references.

- Authors have missed to elaborated both aims and objectives. This section is not considered satisfying.

- A clear and indisputable null hypothesis would seem missing.

Meths

- Numerous aspects do not belong to the Methodology section here. Remember not to provide a literature review with this section. Please revise thoroughly, and provide references. Your explanation of EPPM should be transferred to the Intro section.

- "In total, 300 (34.8%) completed electronic questionnaires were received." This would seem to present a results, right?

- Please compare: "0.78 for "perceived severity" 0.78, 0.84 for 140 "self-efficacy", (...)", and you will understand that it seem doubtful whether all co-authors have read and approved this manuscript.

- "was consisted of 30 questions which covered 144 five constrcuts": Again, please revise thoroughly, and eliminate all language shortcomings.

- What is "susestbility"?

Results

- Again, this section has not been convincingly elaborated. Numerous typos should be eliminated, to facilitate reading.

Disc

- As with the other sections, proper elaborations would seem mandatory. See "efficacy" vs "efficiency".

- "COVID 19 infection had been selected since it is currently an international public health problem." This is not considered a "strength" of the submitted study/paper.

- "Based on the results, specific target groups can be identified and the necessary interventions can be tailored according to the control processes." Please provide these informations. What "specific target groups", and "what necessary interventions to be tailored" do you refer to?

- What is "bias induced by social utility"? Please explain.

Concl

- Please do not simply repeat your results here. Instead, provide a reasonable extension of your outcome.

- Stick exclusively to your aims, and focus on your outcome. Do not provide general phrases or common places here.

Tables & Figs

- Do not repeat or double your results.

In total, this draft would seem in need of a thorough revision, and is not considered ready to proceed.

**********

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

Reviewer #3: 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.

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: PONE-D-20-14093_reviewer.pdf

PONE-D-20-14093R1

Fear Control and Danger Control Amid COVID-19 Dental Crisis: Application of the Extended Parallel Process Model

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Bashirian,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that your submitted paper might have merit but still does not meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands.

Having intensively reviewed your draft, our external referees have indicated that most revisions would be satisfying; however, I still have found major shortcomings, please see R #3 comments. All in all, the indicated shortcomings are considered reasonable with regard to both PLOS ONE's quality standards and our readership's expectations. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses each and every point raised during the review process. Please pay special attention to language, structure and coherence of your full text, and to uniform formatting of your References section (please stick to our Authors' Guidelines).

Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 03 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,

Andrej M Kielbassa

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

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

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: No

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

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: Yes

Reviewer #3: No

**********

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: Yes

Reviewer #3: No

**********

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: Dear Authors

I have quickly reviewed and found that all authors done very well. All the reviewer suggestions look addressed nicely.

If there is any grammatical error correct carefully in the gallery proof from the journal.

Reviewer #2: Thank you for improving your manuscript and adressing all of my comments. This topic is utterly important and should be published in order to provide healthcare policy makers with sufficient information regarding it.

Reviewer #3: This revised and re-submitted draft has been considerably improved, no doubt. However, several aspects still would not seem satisfying, and language/writing has not been convincingly revised. Please note that this is the authors' responsibility, and there are many authors with this manuscript who should take care.

- Please note that one/two sentences do not constitute one paragraph. Please revise carefully, and summarize your thoughts in reasonable sections. Revise throughout your text.

- "As of 28th of March, COVID19 has been diagnosed in 199 countries with 614,231 laboratory-confirmed cases and 28,240 deaths (2) ." Please update your information. Meanwhile, it is July.

- Revise thoroughly for spacebar use.

- "(...)COVID-19 epidemic.” " Please revise for quotation marks not considered necessary.

- p≤0.05 must read p<0.05.

- All p values must be given on a three-digit basis. Revise thoroughly.

- Again, please revise carefully. "efficacy(LT/HE)" should read "efficacy (LT/HE)".

- Same with "Table 3. Health (...)".

- Same with "P.Value". Delete your dot.

- Please compare: behavior2:, behavior 4:, "(gowns , apron, (...)".

- Please revise: "disease -related guidelines", "self-regulation model , etc.," What is "etc"? Why closing this sentence with a comma?

- Referees still not uniformly formatted. Please see Authors' Guidelines.

**********

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: Yes: Dr. Maayan Shacham

Reviewer #3: 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.

Fear Control and Danger Control Amid COVID-19 Dental Crisis: Application of the Extended Parallel Process Model

PONE-D-20-14093R2

Dear Dr. Bashirian,

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,

Andrej M Kielbassa, Prof. Dr. med. dent. Dr. h. c.

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 #3: 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 #3: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

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 #3: 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 #3: 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 #3: This resubmitted draft would seem ready to proceed. All shortcomings having been identified recently have been addressed.

**********

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 #3: No