The impact of believing you have had COVID-19 on self-reported behaviour: Cross-sectional survey

Louise E. Smith; Abigail L. Mottershaw; Mark Egan; Jo Waller; Theresa M. Marteau; G. James Rubin

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0240399

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJuly 30, 2020
10 Sep 2020 Decision Letter - Ramesh Kumar, Editor PONE-D-20-23741 The impact of believing you have had COVID-19 on self-reported behaviour: Cross-sectional survey PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Smith, 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 Oct 25 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. 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We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide. 5. Thank you for stating the following in your Competing Interests section: 'JW is funded by a career development fellowship from Cancer Research UK (ref C7492/A17219). LS and GJR are supported by the National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit (NIHR HPRU) in Emergency Preparedness and Response at King’s College London in partnership with Public Health England (PHE), in collaboration with the University of East Anglia and Newcastle University. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care, Public Health England. Data collection was funded via a block Government grant to the Behavioural Insights Team.' a. Please complete your Competing Interests statement to state any Competing Interests. If you have no competing interests, please state "The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.", as detailed online in our guide for authors at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submit-now b. This information should be included in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. Please know it is PLOS ONE policy for corresponding authors to declare, on behalf of all authors, all potential competing interests for the purposes of transparency. PLOS defines a competing interest as anything that interferes with, or could reasonably be perceived as interfering with, the full and objective presentation, peer review, editorial decision-making, or publication of research or non-research articles submitted to one of the journals. Competing interests can be financial or non-financial, professional, or personal. Competing interests can arise in relationship to an organization or another person. Please follow this link to our website for more details on competing interests: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests 6. We noted in your submission details that a portion of your manuscript may have been presented or published elsewhere: 'Results from analyses of the experimental study investigating self-reported behavioural outcomes of antibody test terminology have been published elsewhere (Waller J, Rubin GJ, Potts HWW, Mottershaw AL, Marteau TM. "Immunity Passports" for SARS-CoV-2: an online experimental study of the impact of antibody test terminology on perceived risk and behaviour. BMJ Open. In press. doi: 10.1101/2020.05.06.20093401); this has been highlighted in the manuscript. ' Please clarify whether this publication was peer-reviewed and formally published. If this work was previously peer-reviewed and published, in the cover letter please provide the reason that this work does not constitute dual publication and should be included in the current manuscript. 7. Please upload a copy of Figure 1, to which you refer in your text on page 14. If the figure is no longer to be included as part of the submission please remove all reference to it within the text. [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: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 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: The author must address the following points before the final acceptance of article. 1. Why author selected 18 years old or above age participants? 2. Must add the name of used statistical tool in the abstract section. Reviewer #2: The study “The impact of believing you have had COVID-19 on self-reported behaviour: Cross-sectional survey” is interesting. In this paper the authors investigated whether people who think they have had COVID-19 are less likely to report engaging with lockdown measures compared with those who think they have not had COVID-19. The paper is well set, and the contents are clearly described. The authors almost achieved their objectives. However, the following suggestions should be incorporated before resubmitting the paper. 1. A “conclusion” section must be added which concludes the whole paper. 2. The results from Table 1 and Table 2 are hard to read. Please add some graphs/plots which represent these results in pictorial form. Because a picture is worth more than a thousand words. ****** 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.] 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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240399.r001
Revision 1
17 Sep 2020 Author Response 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 The manuscript is now formatted in accordance with PLOS ONE’s style requirements. 2. Please provide additional details regarding participant consent. In the ethics statement in the Methods and online submission information, please ensure that you have specified (i) whether consent was informed and (ii) what type you obtained (for instance, written or verbal, and if verbal, how it was documented and witnessed). We have now stated in the manuscript that “submission of completed study materials implied consent to take part in the study. Participants were informed of this before starting the study.” If your study included minors, state whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians. The study did not include minors. If the need for consent was waived by the ethics committee, please include this information. Ethical approval for this study, including consent method, was granted by the King’s College London Research Ethics Committee (reference: MRA-19/20-18485). If you are reporting a retrospective study of medical records or archived samples, please ensure that you have discussed whether all data were fully anonymized before you accessed them and/or whether the IRB or ethics committee waived the requirement for informed consent. If patients provided informed written consent to have data from their medical records used in research, please include this information. N/A. 3. In your Supporting Information section, please provide a copy of your questionaire used in this study if available. We have now included the survey items as supporting information (S1 File). 4. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide. Noted; if the manuscript is accepted, we will provide the details relevant to access the data. 5. Thank you for stating the following in your Competing Interests section: 'JW is funded by a career development fellowship from Cancer Research UK (ref C7492/A17219). LS and GJR are supported by the National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit (NIHR HPRU) in Emergency Preparedness and Response at King’s College London in partnership with Public Health England (PHE), in collaboration with the University of East Anglia and Newcastle University. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care, Public Health England. Data collection was funded via a block Government grant to the Behavioural Insights Team.' a. Please complete your Competing Interests statement to state any Competing Interests. If you have no competing interests, please state "The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.", as detailed online in our guide for authors at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submit-now The Competing Interest statement should read: 'JW is funded by a career development fellowship from Cancer Research UK (ref C7492/A17219). LS and GJR are supported by the National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit (NIHR HPRU) in Emergency Preparedness and Response, a partnership between Public Health England, King’s College London and the University of East Anglia. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NIHR, Public Health England or the Department of Health and Social Care. Data collection was funded via a block Government grant to the Behavioural Insights Team’ b. This information should be included in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. Thank you. Please know it is PLOS ONE policy for corresponding authors to declare, on behalf of all authors, all potential competing interests for the purposes of transparency. PLOS defines a competing interest as anything that interferes with, or could reasonably be perceived as interfering with, the full and objective presentation, peer review, editorial decision-making, or publication of research or non-research articles submitted to one of the journals. Competing interests can be financial or non-financial, professional, or personal. Competing interests can arise in relationship to an organization or another person. Please follow this link to our website for more details on competing interests: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests 6. We noted in your submission details that a portion of your manuscript may have been presented or published elsewhere: 'Results from analyses of the experimental study investigating self-reported behavioural outcomes of antibody test terminology have been published elsewhere (Waller J, Rubin GJ, Potts HWW, Mottershaw AL, Marteau TM. "Immunity Passports" for SARS-CoV-2: an online experimental study of the impact of antibody test terminology on perceived risk and behaviour. BMJ Open. In press. doi: 10.1101/2020.05.06.20093401); this has been highlighted in the manuscript. ' Please clarify whether this publication was peer-reviewed and formally published. If this work was previously peer-reviewed and published, in the cover letter please provide the reason that this work does not constitute dual publication and should be included in the current manuscript. Results from participants included in this study have been published elsewhere (BMJ Open). This publication was peer-reviewed and has been published. Work does not constitute dual publication as it reports on results of an experimental study investigating self-reported behavioural outcomes of antibody test terminology. Those results are not included in the current study, nor were any results from this study presented in the BMJ Open paper. Statements to this effect have been added to the manuscript. 7. Please upload a copy of Figure 1, to which you refer in your text on page 14. If the figure is no longer to be included as part of the submission please remove all reference to it within the text. We apologise for this omission. Figure 1 has now been uploaded as part of the submission. Reviewers' comments: 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 author must address the following points before the final acceptance of article. 1. Why author selected 18 years old or above age participants? We chose to recruit only those aged 18 years and older as we wanted to investigate associations in an adult population. 2. Must add the name of used statistical tool in the abstract section. We have now added a sentence to the abstract stating that “we used logistic regression analyses and one-way ANOVAs to investigate associations between believing you had had COVID-19 and binary and continuous outcomes respectively.” Reviewer #2: The study “The impact of believing you have had COVID-19 on self-reported behaviour: Cross-sectional survey” is interesting. In this paper the authors investigated whether people who think they have had COVID-19 are less likely to report engaging with lockdown measures compared with those who think they have not had COVID-19. The paper is well set, and the contents are clearly described. The authors almost achieved their objectives. However, the following suggestions should be incorporated before resubmitting the paper. 1. A “conclusion” section must be added which concludes the whole paper. We have now added a conclusion section to the paper. 2. The results from Table 1 and Table 2 are hard to read. Please add some graphs/plots which represent these results in pictorial form. Because a picture is worth more than a thousand words. We have now included a graph depicting differences between people who thought they had had COVID-19 and those who thought they had not had COVID-19 and outcomes (thinking you are immune; shopping behaviour; meeting up with friends/family; out-of-home activity; worry about COVID-19; perceived risk of COVID-19; and ability to identify symptoms of COVID-19). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240399.r002
28 Sep 2020 Decision Letter - Ramesh Kumar, Editor The impact of believing you have had COVID-19 on self-reported behaviour: Cross-sectional survey PONE-D-20-23741R1 Dear Dr. Smith, 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, Ramesh Kumar, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240399.r003
Formally Accepted
20 Oct 2020 Acceptance Letter - Ramesh Kumar, Editor PONE-D-20-23741R1 The impact of believing you have had COVID-19 on self-reported behaviour: Cross-sectional survey Dear Dr. Smith: 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 Dr. Ramesh Kumar Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240399.r004

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