Peer Review History
Original SubmissionJuly 26, 2022 |
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PONE-D-22-21048Long COVID - Six months of prospective follow-up of changes in symptom profiles of non-hospitalised children and young people after SARS-CoV-2 testing: a national matched cohort study (The CLoCk) Study.PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Pinto Pereira, 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 08 2022 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. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
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In your Methods section, please ensure you have also stated whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians of the minors included in the study or whether the research ethics committee or IRB specifically waived the need for their consent. 4. Thank you for stating the following in the Competing Interests section: "Terence Stephenson is Chair of the Health Research Authority and therefore recused himself from the Research Ethics Application. Trudie Chalder is a member of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence committee for long COVID. She has written self-help books on chronic fatigue and has done workshops on chronic fatigue and post infectious syndromes. All remaining authors have no conflicts of interest. " Please confirm that this does not alter your adherence to all PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials, by including the following statement: "This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.” (as detailed online in our guide for authors http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests). If there are restrictions on sharing of data and/or materials, please state these. Please note that we cannot proceed with consideration of your article until this information has been declared. Please include your updated Competing Interests statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. Additional Editor Comments: Thank you for submitting your manuscript. The reviewers and I believe it is of potential value for our readers. However, the reviewers have raised a number of very important issues, and their excellent comments will need to be adequately addressed in a revision before the acceptability of your manuscript for publication in the Journal can be determined. We cannot guarantee that your revised paper will be chosen for publication; this would be solely based on how satisfactorily you have addressed the reviewer comments. [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: Partly Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ********** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: I Don't Know Reviewer #3: 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: No Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: 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 Reviewer #3: 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: This is an interesting paper from an important study, elements of which have been described elsewhere. It is a large study. The response medium was not self-evident from the paper, but I presume was electronic rather than paper-based. For a contemporary follow-up study, the follow up rate was pretty reasonable, but Professor Dillman would be deeply disappointed such an outcome- it is always a challenge in such studies to balance overall numbers of respondents with the persistence needed to get a higher rate of return from a smaller group. My main issue however is with the analysis. The sample size is large- it is not clear to my why univariate analyses have need used, rather than data reduction strategies such as principle component and factor analyses to get at the underlying structure of symptomatic responses. The authors argue that that the late-onset' symptoms probably represents a late onset of a 'non-specific viral illness. This would be amuch more powerful argument if an initial cluster has been identified at an earlier point, with more COVID specific symptoms forming other components. The authors include at least two mentions of authors with statistical expertise-a fuller discussion of the analytic approach adopted here would be valuable. And I would also add that the 'stacked bar graphs are, as often the case, very hard to interpret. Line graphs which allow an easy interpretation of the distribution of symptoms across time are much easier to follow, and would make the emergence of a 'late onset symptom population umore obvious. As a small point, the issue of exclusion of subjects who reported testing positive during teh study period should be clearly identified in the text, as its an obvious issue. Reviewer #2: Thank you for the opportunity to review this research article. This is a very timely and interesting study. I would like to complement authors for maintaining rigour in the conduct of this study and for providing adequate details to convey their findings. I did not find any major issues in the conduct and reporting of the study. However, I would just make a very minor suggestion – Authors have mentioned CLoCK study on several occasions and have cited previous findings from this study, however I think that the current manuscript should stand on its own and readers should have enough information within current manuscript without referring to other publications. So, maybe authors can provide additional details about CLoCK study within current manuscript. In the Method section, mention the response rate in the recruitment process. In figure 1. The word “reinfected (n-27)” is covered by another box. Please fix it. Another suggestion would be to have a “Conclusion” section at the end. In the current format, the last paragraph consist of limitations and importance of this study. I would recommend adding the conclusion section and highlighting some of the key findings. The statements in line 351 on page 15 “It is our view that new symptoms…….” And line 355 on page 15 “ However, regardless of whether symptoms…..” are very important statements, so in my opinion they should be part of conclusion section and should be highlighted in the abstract too. Reviewer #3: Thank you for inviting me as a reviewer of this article. I would like to suggest adding following sentence and citation on the "Statistical methods" section. Prevalence N (%) of CYP who had a symptom (never, once, twice or thrice) at testing, at 3 months 211 post-test, at 6 months post-test was tested by Chi-squared test [1] [1] https://doi.org/10.54724/lc.2022.e1 ********** 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 Reviewer #3: 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. 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Revision 1 |
Long COVID - Six months of prospective follow-up of changes in symptom profiles of non-hospitalised children and young people after SARS-CoV-2 testing: a national matched cohort study (The CLoCk) Study. PONE-D-22-21048R1 Dear Dr. Pinto Pereira, 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, 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: (No Response) Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed ********** 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 #3: Yes ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #3: 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: No Reviewer #3: 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 #3: 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: This remains an important study. The authors have responded to the comments that I provided on the original manuscript. They have clarified why they have decided to continue with univariate analyses. This is now a matter of opinion. In my view, the fact that symptomatic clusters might vary across populations is the reason why multivariate analyses are conducted, so that the extent to which a potential syndrome is a generalised phenomenon, with a common origin, may be assessed. However, I do not see this difference in opinion as a reason to hold up publication of a timely study. I just hope that the large data set that has been assembled is analysed in a more nuanced way at some point in the future Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed. Thank you to the authors and editors for considering my opinion on this manuscript. ********** 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: No Reviewer #3: No ********** |
Formally Accepted |
PONE-D-22-21048R1 Long COVID - Six months of prospective follow-up of changes in symptom profiles of non-hospitalised children and young people after SARS-CoV-2 testing: a national matched cohort study (The CLoCk) Study. Dear Dr. Pinto Pereira: 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. Dong Keon Yon Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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