PONE-D-20-20624

Knowledge, Attitudes, and Fear of COVID-19 during the Rapid Rise Period in Bangladesh

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Hossain,

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Amir H. Pakpour, Ph.D.

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: Yes

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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: 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: The study entitled “Knowledge, Attitudes, and Fear of COVID-19 during the Rapid Rise Period in Bangladesh” has the strength of a large sample size (n=2157). However, the manuscript suffers from many flaws and I am not sure whether the authors can satisfactorily revise their work.

1. The authors have wrong statistical knowledge in the significance level. We do not use p=0.05, we use p0.05. That is, if the p-value is right at the 0.05, the comparison is not significant. However, the authors use = throughout the manuscript.

2. The authors conducted some ANOVA tests and did not further conduct the post-hoc analysis.

3. The authors used “r” to report the regression findings. However, “r” refers to Pearson’s’ r (or some use an r to represent Spearman’s rho). The r should not be used for regression models and the presentation is confusing and misleading.

4. The authors sometimes report a p-value at 0.000. However, it is impossible for a p-value to be exactly at 0.000. p0.001 should be used instead.

5. The information of questions on knowledge, attitude, and practice is vague and insufficient for me to evaluate. Specifically, the psychometric properties of these questions are unknown and how did the authors ensure that these questions developed from a Chinese study can be applicable to the present study?

6. The abbreviation of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale should be FCV-19S, not FCS. Also, the psychometric properties paper on Bangla version of the FCV-19S has been published. The authors should acknowledge this and cite properly.

7. The Introduction does not prepare the readers why the authors want to examine knowledge, attitude, practice, and fear for different subgroups using the demographics. Also, it is unclear why the authors wanted to examine the associations between these factors.

8. Line 207, I cannot understand why the people aged between 41 and 60 years can be defined as “young adults”. They are already middle age. Also, what is the meaning of “young” here? Do the authors want to say youth?

9. The authors reported the COVID 19 Symptoms and Comorbidity. However, the authors did not mention how they assessed these symptoms and comorbidity.

10. The authors mentioned that they used chi-square test in the Data analysis section; however, there are no results on chi-square values in the Results section.

11. The presentation of Table 2 is confusing. What are the “others” in the variables column? Also, the authors should explicitly indicate what the reference group is.

12. The authors mentioned that they performed binary logistic regression in the Data analysis section; however, I see no results on the logistic regression in the Results section.

13. The meanings of SSC and HSC in the Table 3 are unclear.

14. The Discussion reports redundant information; that is, the author repeated their results in the Discussion again. However, I did not see the authors “explain” their findings in the Discussion. They simply repeated the Results and then mentioned other similar studies’ findings.

15. There are some awkward sentences hinder the reading. For example, “Limitations response rates, correlation with fear and psychological issues, and completion of the questionnaire for COVID-19 positive. We recommend future studies to include information on limitation of movement, isolation and insomnia as it relates to psychological illness, as well as information regarding neurological signs and symptoms of patients and relationship to cognition and fear.”

16. The authors mentioned the age range of 13-90 in the Abstract. However, the age range is 13-88 in the Results section.

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Reviewer #1: No

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Knowledge, Attitudes, and Fear of COVID-19 during the Rapid Rise Period in Bangladesh

PONE-D-20-20624R1

Dear Dr. Hossain,

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.

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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,

Amir H. Pakpour, 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

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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

**********

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

Reviewer #1: 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

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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

**********

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: The authors have satisfactorily respond to my prior comments. I have no more comments for the revised manuscript.

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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