Peer Review History

Original SubmissionOctober 20, 2021
Decision Letter - Raffaele Serra, Editor

PONE-D-21-33659Mortality and associated risk factors in patients hospitalized due to COVID-19 in a Peruvian reference hospital.PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Soto,

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.

The manuscript is interesting but some improvements are needed.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Prof. Raffaele Serra, M.D., Ph.D

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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[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

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

Reviewer #1: 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

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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 authors aimed to determine risk factors for in-hospital mortality in patients with COVID-19 from a Peruvian national hospital.

The findings are interesting but there are no valid comments on cardiovascular disease (except hypertension) that are important factors for mortality in COVID-19 patients. I think in the discussion section the importance of cardiovascular disease must be deepened. For example cite and discuss the paper by Ielapi N. et al. Cardiovascular disease as a biomarker for an increased risk of COVID-19 infection and related poor prognosis. Biomark Med. 2020 Jun;14(9):713-716.

Overall considered discussion section is too superficial and must be better tailored on the main aspects of the paper.

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Reviewer #1: No

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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.

Revision 1

Dear Editor:

Following the reviewers and editor evaluation of the original research article entitled “Mortality and associated risk factors in patients hospitalized due to COVID-19 in a Peruvian reference hospital” we have included the suggestions in the manuscript, which is sent as separates files with and without track changes.

Below, you will find the answers to the specific comments.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including

those for file naming.

Answer

We have updated the article formatting to fulfill 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 (1) whether consent was informed and (2) what type you obtained (for instance, written or verbal, and if verbal, how it was documented and witnessed). If your study included minors, state whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians. If the need for consent was waived by the ethics committee, please include this information. 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.

Answer

The study was limited to the retrospective review of medical records. Collection of data were anonymized before entered in the database file. The study was approved by the Department of Medicine of HNHU and by the Institutional Ethics Committees of HNHU (letter 116-2021-CIEI-HNHU) and Universidad Ricardo Palma (PG-25-2020). The scanned version of both letters are included in the new submission.

3. We note that you have indicated that data from this study are available upon request. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For more information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions.

Answer

Due to a misunderstanding, we believe that the standard procedure was giving the data upon request. However, we are willing to share the database of the study. Therefore, we have upload the anonymized dataset.

Reviewer Comments to the Author

Reviewer #1: The authors aimed to determine risk factors for in-hospital mortality in patients with COVID-19 from a Peruvian national hospital.

The findings are interesting but there are no valid comments on cardiovascular disease (except hypertension) that are important factors for mortality in COVID-19 patients. I think in the discussion section the importance of cardiovascular disease must be deepened. For example cite and discuss the paper by Ielapi N. et al. Cardiovascular disease as a biomarker for an increased risk of COVID-19 infection and related poor prognosis. Biomark Med. 2020 Jun;14(9):713-716.

Overall considered discussion section is too superficial and must be better tailored on the main aspects of the paper.

Answer

We have updated and improved the discussion, expanding the scope including relevant studies regarding cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. We added several additional references including the one suggested by the reviewer.

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.

Answer

We have updated the figures using the PACE tool. They are now compatible with PLOS requirements.

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Response to reviewers.docx
Decision Letter - Raffaele Serra, Editor

Mortality and associated risk factors in patients hospitalized due to COVID-19 in a Peruvian reference hospital.

PONE-D-21-33659R1

Dear Dr. Soto,

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,

Prof. Raffaele Serra, M.D., Ph.D

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

amended manuscript is acceptable

Reviewers' comments:

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Raffaele Serra, Editor

PONE-D-21-33659R1

Mortality and associated risk factors in patients hospitalized due to COVID-19 in a Peruvian reference hospital.

Dear Dr. Soto:

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.

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Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access.

Kind regards,

PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff

on behalf of

Prof. Raffaele Serra

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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