Figures
There are errors in the Author Contributions. The correct contributions are:
Conceptualization: B. Tlou
Data curation: F. Tanser
Formal analysis: B. Tlou
Funding acquisition: F. Tanser
Methodology: B. Tlou
Resources: F. Tanser
Supervision: B. Sartorius, F. Tanser
Writing–original draft: B. Tlou
After publication of this article [1], the corresponding author notified the journal office that there are errors in the data analysis underlying their paper. The corresponding author explained that for the survival analysis, person time used in the original analyses consisted of the last observed episode for each child rather than the total person time contributed from birth or immigration to censoring, death or out-migration. This leads to underestimation of person time at risk, which impacts both the rate calculations and, to a lesser degree, the risk factor analysis. While the overall secular trend over the period remains largely unchanged, this error also leads to overestimation of the mortality rates concerned. The corresponding author reran the models using the fuller person time offsets for each child and notes that the effect size for the hazard ratios and significance thereof is largely unchanged.
In addition, the corresponding author clarified that he performed the re-analyses using a complete case analysis (i.e., The included records which had no missing covariate information). This resulted in utilizing 759 deaths for which there was complete data for all covariates/risk factors considered. While a “complete” cohort approach for risk factor analysis may not be a major limitation, in terms of performing a full due diligence, the corresponding author would like to clarify that he should have included details of the full cohort and description of the missing data in the original paper.
The corresponding author provides updates to the Abstract, Results, Tables 2–4 and Fig 2 to correct these errors. Please see the location of the error, the original text, and the author-corrected text here.
The reduction from 2000–2005 to 2006–2014 is more significant, albeit that the rate levels have come down due to the denominator issue alluded to already. Please see the corrected Table 2.
Fig 2 needs to be updated to reflect the change in the y-axis values, rather than any changes to trend pattern over the period. The authors clarify that secular trend pattern remains the same but the rate value changes due to the use of the incorrect denominator (last episode only rather than full person time contribution under 5 years of age and for relevant age bands within the <5 range). Please see the corrected Fig 2.
After reanalysis, the major risk factors following multivariable adjustment remain the same with very minor changes in coefficient values and associated population attributable fraction estimates, namely: poverty (residing in a household in the poorest socio-economic quantile), non-piped water source, mother HIV status, mother vital status and period of death (2000–2005). In addition, mother vital status was not included in the original multivariable infant model and should have been based on its bivariate association. It is included in the corrected multivariable model and is a significant determinant for infant mortality in Tables 3 and 4. Please see the corrected Tables 3 and 4
It is highlighted in the Discussion that socioeconomic status, source of drinking water, mother’s HIV status, and period of death are significant risk factors associated with under-five and infant mortality. The corresponding author would like to clarify that even though the same conclusions still hold based on the corrected findings, socioeconomic status is not statistically significant for under-five mortality following multivariable adjustment for this age band.
Reference
Citation: Tlou B, Sartorius B, Tanser F (2024) Correction: Investigating risk factors for under-five mortality in an HIV hyper-endemic area of rural South Africa, from 2000–2014. PLoS ONE 19(6): e0306379. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0306379
Published: June 27, 2024
Copyright: © 2024 Tlou et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.