PONE-D-21-33692Trends in social exposure to SARS-Cov-2 in France. Evidence from the national socio-epidemiological cohort – EPICOV Evidence from the national socio-epidemiological cohort – EPICOVPLOS ONE

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PLOS ONE

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Dr. Bajos has  received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. [856478])

This project has also received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101016167, ORCHESTRA (Connecting European Cohorts to Increase Common and Effective Response to SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic)."

  

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Dr. Bajos has  received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. [856478])

This project has also received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101016167, ORCHESTRA (Connecting European Cohorts to Increase Common and Effective Response to SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic)."

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Dr. Bajos has  received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. [856478])

This project has also received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101016167, ORCHESTRA (Connecting European Cohorts to Increase Common and Effective Response to SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic)."

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Additional Editor Comments:

Please address the excellent comments from the reviewers.

Minor comments

1. please disucss the paper below.

Lee SW, Yuh WT, Yang JM, Cho YS, Yoo IK, Koh HY, Marshall D, Oh D, Ha EK, Han MY, Yon DK. Nationwide Results of COVID-19 Contact Tracing in South Korea: Individual Participant Data From an Epidemiological Survey. JMIR Med Inform. 2020 Aug 25;8(8):e20992. doi: 10.2196/20992. PMID: 32784189; PMCID: PMC7470235.

2. Title

Trends in social exposure to SARS-Cov-2 in France. Evidence from the national socioepidemiological cohort – EPICOV Evidence from the national socio-epidemiological cohort – EPICOV

->

Trends in social exposure to SARS-Cov-2: Results from the French Nationwide Cohort

[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

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: 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

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: Trends in social exposure to SARS-Cov-2 in France. Evidence from the national socioepidemiological cohort – EPICOV Evidence from the national socio-epidemiological cohort – EPICOV

Title is adequate.

The abstract is well described and objective.

Keywords: I suggest to the authors to exclude some keywords as “random sample” and include keywords that remind the country the study was conducted.

Introduction: Very adequate.

“African, Asian and other ethnic minorities were disproportionately affected by SARS-CoV-2 in Europe and North America during the first epidemic wave.” Please include “Latin-American individuals”.

“France has been severely affected by COVID-19. The first wave peaked two weeks after the first lockdown initiated on 17th March” Please describe here the year. Also please describe in the text if it was a national lockdown or regional lockdown.

“The second wave started slowly at the end of August,” Same observation as described above regarding the year.

“but leaving more opportunities to get together from the summer.” Please clarify this statement .

Aim of the study is adequate and well-described.

Methods:

Please describe what is “FIDELI administrative sampling framework” ?

“Residents in nursing homes for elderly persons were excluded.” Please describe why.

Study design is very adequate.

In the Exposure section were evaluated medical conditions of the participants? It is not clear for me.

Results section is well-described. Tables are adequate too. I would suggest to exclude table 4 and describe its information in the text, due to a lot of tables in the study.

Discussion: The discussion section is well argued. I miss other data in the literature on serological surveys in France and in countries that have adopted the lockdown, such as England and Spain.

Strenghts and limitations are adequately described. Conclusion is adequate.

Reviewer #2: Thanks to extensive and well conducted epidemiological study in France, this work has revealed an increased risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in young people and second-generation migrants when restrictions were less stringent between the first two pandemic waves. However, the statistic analysis has not been well detailed in the manuscript. The authors talk about univariate and multivariate analyses, but a much more extensive explanation should be provided. Which statistical tests have been applied, how, and why? Do the data fulfill all requirements to apply these tests? What about the statistical potency? I guess it is high due to the very high sample number. Please, show all details. Please, present the data in an APA format or similar, associating the statistica value to the p-values that appear in tables. I guess the t-test has been applied because the confidence intervals are given, but statistical analysis is of utmost importance here and should be explained very rigorously. I guess that it has been properly performed, but an idea only exist as far as it is written, as Jacques Monod highlighted. The a priori chosen level of statistical significance should be indicated. The same is applicable to correlation and logistic regression analysis and inference.

As the authors point out in the "Limitations" section, circulating antibody titles may vary and decay over time, and even they disappear in certain cases. However, memory B cell analysis is not feasible in this context. In lines 385 through 387, the authors highlight consistency between factors associated to incidence and prevalence. However, this does not solve the limitation, and this should be also pointed out. In this sentence, "of new infections" should be removed, because this is included in the "incidence" concept.

Please, remove an extra space after period in line 391. There are also some extra spaces to remove in the supplementary file. Please, carefully review this.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Vicente Sperb Antonello

Reviewer #2: No

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Trends in social exposure to SARS-Cov-2 in France. Evidence from the national socio-epidemiological cohort – EPICOV

PONE-D-21-33692R1

Dear Dr. Warszawski,

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,

Dong Keon Yon, MD, FACAAI

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

This is an excellent paper.

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

Reviewer #2: 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

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: 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

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #2: 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: I have carefully read the review carried out by the authors. All my questions were answered properly and adjustments were made. Therefore, I recommend this article for publication in Plos One.

Reviewer #2: In my opinion, the manuscript is now ready for publication because all isues raised have been adequately addressed and the manuscript improved accordingly.

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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: Vicente Sperb Antonello

Reviewer #2: No