PONE-D-21-14417

Patterns of Mental Health Problems Before and After Easing COVID-19 Restrictions: Evidence from a 105248-subject Survey in General Population in China

PLOS ONE

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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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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

Reviewer #2: 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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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: -A single Wenjuanxing platform was used for data collection. A single platform may have a biased sample due to user groups. Therefore, the rationality of using a single Wenjuanxing platform and the potential impact on the sample should be explained.

-The time of data collection needs to be given more precisely. Due to the long collection time, a trend graph of data collection can be drawn.

-Different sample sets were used in the two stages before and after. It may be due to changes in platform distribution methods and other reasons that the sample structure before and after is quite different (such as age, gender, region, etc.), resulting in a lack of comparability in the analysis. Therefore, it is recommended to explain the risk.

-Table 3 does not give regression statistical parameters, such as R2, F value, etc.

Reviewer #2: Review of Manuscript ID: PONE-D-21-14417

Title of manuscript: Patterns of Mental Health Problems Before and After Easing COVID-19 Restrictions: Evidence from a 105248-subject Survey in General Population in China

The overall purposes of this study are to provide empirical evidence of the patterns of mental health in large general population in China both before and after easing restrictions and to examine the factors at both individual and regional levels that contributed to and/or mitigated these patterns. Understanding these patterns is very important for policy makers and health care workers as well as the scholarly community; thus this paper can be very impactful. In addition, the size of the survey data is unusual and appealing in light of the current literature on this topic, which typically relies on the limited number of respondents for empirical analysis. Overall, the paper had a clear message and was very well-written. I think this paper can make a significant contribution to the literature in mental health among general population during pandemic.

Below I have some minor comments that could improve the manuscript.

Abstract:

• Suggest to add brief information about the mental health issues has become a major health concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Suggestion to change the last sentence in background: The findings from this research study have provided the empirical evidence …………………, and information of the factors associated with these patterns.

Introduction: It is well organized and easy to follow. The authors have provided sufficient up-to-date citations from other studies which support the readers to understand the current research gaps, objectives and the findings from this paper.

• Page 11 ( page #22 in paper), Line 40 : Suggest to change “To our knowledge, no studies have been conducted to examine the …”

• Page 11 (page#22 in the paper), Line 41-43: Suggest to delete commas and change “ The objectives of the study were to provide empirical evidence of the patterns of mental health in general population both before and after easing restrictions and to examine the factors at both individual and regional levels that contributed to and/or mitigated these mental health patterns.

Methods:

• Page 12 ( page #23 in paper), Line 58: Exclusion criteria – the authors may include the reasons why these groups of population (b. being aged < 20 years and being married, divorced or widowed; c. being aged < 20 years and having a degree of Master or PhD) were excluded from this current study.

• Page 13 (page #24 in paper), Line 75: suggest to change “LCA was also used to classify individuals into distinct classes.”

Results:

• Page 14 (page # 25 in paper), Line 116: Suggest to specify which classes. E.g., However, after easing restrictions as shown in Table 2, females had a greater chance of being in both “High Risk (Class one) and Stressed, Social Dysfunction and Unhappy (Class Two)” .

• Page 15: (page #26 in paper), Line 132: Suggest to provide additional information on the age range/group for seniors and teenagers and include them in the methods section.

• Page 17: (page# 28 in paper), Line 178: Suggest to change the word “children” to “teenagers or young adults” because people who are younger than 12 years old were excluded from the study; Several terms were used to represent a “young adults” group, such as children, youths, teenagers, as well as terms for “seniors”, such as elderly people – suggest to keep them consistent throughout this paper.

Discussion:

• Further to the limitations of this current study, it would be helpful to include the future research studies and/or lines of work that should be considered.

Overall: This paper is clear, well founded that provides the essential information on the mental health patterns and associated factors in a large general population both before and after easing COVID-19 restrictions. Given the potential value of the current study, I strongly recommend that the authors will take the above suggestions into consideration and revise the manuscript, in order to improve this interesting research work.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Patterns of Mental Health Problems Before and After Easing COVID-19 Restrictions: Evidence from a 105248-subject Survey in General Population in China

PONE-D-21-14417R1

Dear Dr. Jiang,

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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Kind regards,

Wen-Jun Tu

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

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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

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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: (No Response)

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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: Yes: Bo Chen