Exploring the awareness, attitudes, and actions (AAA) of UK adults at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19

Stuart W. Flint; Adrian Brown; George Sanders; Abd A. Tahrani

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0259376

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMay 9, 2021
10 Aug 2021 Decision Letter - Christophe Leroyer, Editor PONE-D-21-15375 Exploring the awareness, attitudes, and actions (AAA) of UK adults at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Brown, 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 September 30th. 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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During our internal evaluation of the manuscript, we found significant text overlap between your submission and the following previously published works, some of which you are an author. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/12/e045309.info We would like to make you aware that copying extracts from previous publications, especially outside the methods section, word-for-word is unacceptable. In addition, the reproduction of text from published reports has implications for the copyright that may apply to the publications. Please revise the manuscript to rephrase the duplicated text, cite your sources, and provide details as to how the current manuscript advances on previous work. Please note that further consideration is dependent on the submission of a manuscript that addresses these concerns about the overlap in text with published work. We will carefully review your manuscript upon resubmission, so please ensure that your revision is thorough. Additional Editor Comments (if provided): [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: My answer is generally very favorable, but one point needs clarification. The author repeatedly associates "mental health" and "well-being". So there seems to be a closeness between the two terms as well as a difference. Could he be more specific? Reviewer #2: Dear Authors, Thanks for submitting your article to PlosOne. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read your very interesting work. The subject of this article is impact of COVID-19 lockdown in a high risk of severe illness UK patients. It is a relevant subject. Authors used a specific questionnaire described in a previous article (BMJ Open 2020). This is a qualitative study on answers from this survey. Methods are relevant. Few data on this field have been published. Tables and results are well described. The article is well structured. Aims of the study are clearly written in introduction and answers well described in discussion and conclusion English language is good. Minor revisions: In Introduction p 4 l76-78: introduction or methods. I think it is relevant to have a specific sentence on your definition of the term impact in methods. Table 1: in the part attitudes and concerns and also self-isolation be careful on tabulation Defined +ve and – ve in legend P 13 l 261 put a ref (maybe not scientific) on Dominic Cumming’s incident or explain it in some words for non UK readers… Discussion: Shortened the discussion Some ref could be added as: Psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic in France: a national assessment of at-risk populations. Chaix B, Delamon G, Guillemassé A, Brouard B, Bibault JE. Gen Psychiatr. 2020 Nov 26;33(6):e100349. doi: 10.1136/gpsych-2020-100349. eCollection 2020. PMID: 34192239 Free PMC article. The limitations of polling data in understanding public support for COVID-19 lockdown policies. Foad CMG, Whitmarsh L, Hanel PHP, Haddock G. R Soc Open Sci. 2021 Jul 7;8(7):210678. doi: 10.1098/rsos.210678. eCollection 2021 Jul. PMID: 34258021 Free PMC article. 1. Understanding the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and containment measures: An empirical model of stress. Wissmath B, Mast FW, Kraus F, Weibel D. PLoS One. 2021 Jul 29;16(7):e0254883. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0254883. eCollection 2021. PMID: 34324498 Free PMC article. 2. Impact of COVID-19-like symptoms on occurrence of anxiety/depression during lockdown among the French general population. Mary-Krause M, Herranz Bustamante JJ, Héron M, Andersen AJ, El Aarbaoui T, Melchior M. PLoS One. 2021 Jul 26;16(7):e0255158. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0255158. eCollection 2021. PMID: 34310661 Free PMC article. ****** 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: Yes:** Anne-Hélène Le Cornec Ubertini, Senior Lecturer in Information and Communication Sciences 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. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: plos one rev UK AAA covid 19 2021.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259376.r001
Revision 1
5 Oct 2021 Author Response Thank you very much for the editors and reviewers useful comments which we have addressed them below. Please find our responses in bold. 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 Thank you for your comment we have reviewed the PLOS ONE style requirements and amended accordingly. 2. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. Thank you for the comment this has been added to the Funding information section as requested as follows: “This study was partly supported by an investigator-initiated grant from Ethicon, Johnson & Johnson to SWF; the funder had no role in study design, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report (grant number: 202004001)” 3. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: “This study was partly supported by an investigator-initiated grant from Ethicon, J&J; the funder had no role in study design, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report.” We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: “This study was partly supported by an investigator-initiated grant from Ethicon, J&J to SWF; the funder had no role in study design, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report.” Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. This has been removed from the main text and has been added to the reply letter as follows: “This study was partly supported by an investigator-initiated grant from Ethicon, Johnson & Johnson to SWF; the funder had no role in study design, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report (grant number: 202004001)” 4. In your Data Availability statement, you have not specified where the minimal data set underlying the results described in your manuscript can be found. PLOS defines a study's minimal data set as the underlying data used to reach the conclusions drawn in the manuscript and any additional data required to replicate the reported study findings in their entirety. All PLOS journals require that the minimal data set be made fully available. For more information about our data policy, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability. "Upon re-submitting your revised manuscript, please upload your study’s minimal underlying data set as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and include the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers within your revised cover letter. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. Any potentially identifying patient information must be fully anonymized. Important: If there are ethical or legal restrictions to sharing your data publicly, please explain these restrictions in detail. Please see our guidelines for more information on what we consider unacceptable restrictions to publicly sharing data: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. Note that it is not acceptable for the authors to be the sole named individuals responsible for ensuring data access. We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter. Thank you for your comment. We have added the study minimal data set to the resubmission find attached. The qualitative data within the study offers in some instances personal and sensitive experiences during COVID-19 e.g., about personal clinical experiences with clinician and about medical conditions, which could result in people being identified. But can be made available for researchers who meet the criteria for access to confidential data on request to the School of Psychology Research ethic committee University of Leeds We have changed the data sharing statement as recommended to the following: "The datasets used in the current study cannot be shared publicly because they contain potentially sensitive and identifiable patient information. Data are available on request from the University of School of Psychology Research ethic committee University of Leeds for researchers who meet the criteria for access to confidential data (psyc-ethicssubmissions@leeds.ac.uk)" 5. 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. As above, we have added the study minimal data set to the resubmission find attached. 6. Please note that in order to use the direct billing option the corresponding author must be affiliated with the chosen institute. Please either amend your manuscript to change the affiliation or corresponding author, or email us at plosone@plos.org with a request to remove this option. Dr Adrian Brown is affiliated with the University College London and should be the corresponding author. There was no place within the revision section of journal platform to confirm this. But have indicated on the manuscript that Dr Brown is the corresponding author and submitted the manuscript. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. Thank you for your comment. We have checked the referencing and added further references in response to changes to the reviewers comments. 7. Thank you for submitting the above manuscript to PLOS ONE. During our internal evaluation of the manuscript, we found significant text overlap between your submission and the following previously published works, some of which you are an author. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/12/e045309.info We would like to make you aware that copying extracts from previous publications, especially outside the methods section, word-for-word is unacceptable. In addition, the reproduction of text from published reports has implications for the copyright that may apply to the publications. Please revise the manuscript to rephrase the duplicated text, cite your sources, and provide details as to how the current manuscript advances on previous work. Please note that further consideration is dependent on the submission of a manuscript that addresses these concerns about the overlap in text with published work. We will carefully review your manuscript upon resubmission, so please ensure that your revision is thorough. Thank you for your feedback and for noting that these sections needed to be addressed in particular in the introduction and methods. We have significantly revised the text to avoid any overlap with the previous publication, please see update manuscript. 1. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.plos.org%2Fplosone%2Fs%2Fsupporting-information&data=04%7C01%7Ca.c.brown%40ucl.ac.uk%7C35cc163fee454a82452408d981f1e66a%7C1faf88fea9984c5b93c9210a11d9a5c2%7C0%7C0%7C637683698214095605%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=%2Bo0eMgfOiavaUpH47CermovLzFfv5Y5m5VUoayEKL3I%3D&reserved=0. Thank you for the comment. We have now included a caption at the end of the manuscript for the supplementary materials called: S1 Supplementary Information: Awareness, Attitudes and Actions (AAA) survey. This is identified within the text where needed. Reviewer 1: We thank this Reviewer for their helpful comments regarding our manuscript and we have addressed each point below. My answer is generally very favorable, but one point needs clarification. The author repeatedly associates "mental health" and "well-being". So there seems to be a closeness between the two terms as well as a difference. Could he be more specific? Thank you for your useful and insightful comment. Mental health and wellbeing are interrelated terms. Mental health is defined as “a positive concept related to the social and emotional wellbeing of individuals and communities”. Wellbeing can be wider to include physical, social as well as psychological wellbeing. Therefore we have used the term “mental health and wellbeing” to be inclusive of both concepts. Reviewer 2: We thank this Reviewer for their helpful comments regarding our manuscript and we have addressed each point below. Dear Authors, Thanks for submitting your article to PlosOne. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read your very interesting work. The subject of this article is impact of COVID-19 lockdown in a high risk of severe illness UK patients. It is a relevant subject. Authors used a specific questionnaire described in a previous article (BMJ Open 2020). This is a qualitative study on answers from this survey. Methods are relevant. Few data on this field have been published. Tables and results are well described. The article is well structured. Aims of the study are clearly written in introduction and answers well described in discussion and conclusion English language is good. Minor revisions: In Introduction p 4 l76-78: introduction or methods. I think it is relevant to have a specific sentence on your definition of the term impact in methods. Thank you for your comment we have moved the sentence within the introduction to the methods and clarified how we are defining impact. Table 1: in the part attitudes and concerns and also self-isolation be careful on tabulation Thank you for the comment we have reviewed the table and the column and rows appear to be appropriately formatted. But we have add addition lines to help Defined +ve and – ve in legend Thank you we have added in this to the note page line P 13 l 261 put a ref (maybe not scientific) on Dominic Cumming’s incident or explain it in some words for non UK readers… Thank you for your comment we have clarified who Dominic Cumming was and also referenced a correspondence published in the Lancet on the incident. Discussion: Shortened the discussion Thank you for your comment. We have reviewed the discussion and shortened the discussion. Please see revised manuscript. Some ref could be added as: Thank you for your recommendation for adding references we have reviewed them and added two of the suggested recommendations that were appropriate. Psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic in France: a national assessment of at-risk populations. Chaix B, Delamon G, Guillemassé A, Brouard B, Bibault JE. Gen Psychiatr. 2020 Nov 26;33(6):e100349. doi: 10.1136/gpsych-2020-100349. eCollection 2020. The limitations of polling data in understanding public support for COVID-19 lockdown policies. Foad CMG, Whitmarsh L, Hanel PHP, Haddock G. R Soc Open Sci. 2021 Jul 7;8(7):210678. doi: 10.1098/rsos.210678. eCollection 2021 Jul. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to reviewers_comments_PLOS ONE.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259376.r002
19 Oct 2021 Decision Letter - Christophe Leroyer, Editor Exploring the awareness, attitudes, and actions (AAA) of UK adults at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19 PONE-D-21-15375R1 Dear Dr. Brown, 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, Christophe Leroyer Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259376.r003
Formally Accepted
26 Oct 2021 Acceptance Letter - Christophe Leroyer, Editor PONE-D-21-15375R1 Exploring the awareness, attitudes, and actions (AAA) of UK adults at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19 Dear Dr. Brown: 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. Christophe Leroyer Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259376.r004

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