COVID-19: Risk Factors and Protective Role of Resilience and Coping Strategies for Emergency Stress and Secondary Trauma in Medical Staff and Emergency Workers—An Online-Based Inquiry

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Well revised manuscript, very few typos left, thank you

Author Response

REPLY: We thank the reviewer for the positive comments.

We reviewed the errors in the text and asked the English Editing company, which had already edited the first draft of the article, for a further revision of the text.

Reviewer 2 Report

The revision is having better quality this time. I think there are few minor problems you should fix.

There should be five hypotheses instead of three hypotheses. In 3.1, if you only wrote limited information, please put table 1 and 2 in appendix and combine these two sentences into 3.2. Otherwise, I don't see why you need 3.1. In 3.2, I have mentioned the writing problem. I do not see changes. 

Author Response

REPLY: We thank the reviewer for the positive comments.

We reviewed the errors in the text and asked the English Editing company, which had already edited the first draft of the article, for a further revision of the text.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this study, authors tried to investigate three hypotheses:

1. Doctors and nurses would have higher stress and secondary trauma scores than other medical workers.
2. The effects of hardiness and coping strategies on stress
3. The mediating effects of hardiness and coping strategies on stress

However, the paper is lack of consistency. In addition, there are some major problems:

1. After reading the introduction section, I could understand that there were many related studies done. However, I don't see the research gap and contribution in your study. You really have to reorganize the introduction section again. It seems like you summarized many papers and then you see there should be mediating effects. Also, why do your make four groups? 
2. In your material and methods section, please delete line 271-283. 
3. In your results section. I think this is a very bad idea to write all the values showed in Table 3 in your sentences. This makes the paragraphs difficult to understand.

Reviewer 2 Report

Online questionnaire based study assessing risks and protective factors of stress and psychological trauma in medical staff and emergency workers. It is concluded that direct contact with COVID-19 patients, female sex, unexpected events and lack of PPE were the main risk factors. Coping strategies and hardiness were protective factors

Specific comments

The title should reflect the study setting, e.g. "COVID-19: Risks and Protective Factors of Emergency Stress and Secondary Trauma in Medical Staff and Emergency Workers- an online based inquiry"

Abstract and main text- please define also primary trauma, only secondary trauma is mentioned

Abstract and main text- define "emergency workers"

Lines 65-67: "presence of high levels of stress... and perceived stress" seems redundant, please amend 

The introduction should be one page only presenting the current state of knowledge and concluding briefly with the aim of the study. Merge rest of introduction with discussion. Avoid redundancies, in doubt choose the shorter version. Keep discussion to 1500 words max. (e.g. 4-5 pages) 

248-249: The selection process of the participants is too vague. How, when (study period) and where they selected? Which platforms were used? Remember, the reader should be able to reproduce the study

255-256: "directly operated in various sectors during the COVID-19 emergency" is to vague, please be more specific. E.g. hospitals, nursing homes, pre- or inhospital? If inhospital, which departments? If data is unavailable add this to the limitations section

Use "physician" instead of "doctor" throughout manuscript

Use "sex" instead of "gender" throughout manuscript 

Lines 272-283 are instructions for authors and not part of this manuscript. This is a major negligence error and should not never happen. Manuscripts might be rejected because of this as it throws a bad light on the conductance of a given study

Lines 289-290 report approval number for this study

The questionnaire of this study should be reported in an English version

A second paragraph in the discussion should defend the study setting of this research project. Why did you choose this method and not another?

Add limitations as discussed above

The conclusions should be exactly in line (copy&paste) with the abstract conclusions. Otherwise one may expect that the authors came to other conclusions in the main text compared to the abstract