Retrospect: The Outbreak Evaluation of COVID-19 in Wuhan District of China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper deals with a hot topical issue of the spread of COVID-19 and strategies to control it. Unfortunately the presentation made in this paper makes it difficult to assess this work, which I think contains results that deserve to be considered. It is for this reason that I ask authors to strictly follow the recommendations below so that I can review their work.

More precisely,

1 - It is imperative to have English corrected by an editing service. Edit the text for the rephrasing making things clear. Also use the simple language modeling epidemiologist

2 - Organize the paper in the following structure: Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion and Conclusion.

3 - The maps, like that of Fig. 1, should be more informative. Indicate the North, the spatial scale, the names of the localities, etc. What is the size of the populations of this locality?

4 - Figures 9 - 13: just display E(t) and I(t) not the summation of both

5 - Present and clearly describe in the Materials and Methods section the developed SEIR model (Model formulation) with a Table giving the definition of the symbols and the values ​​of the parameters. Currently the equations (2) are unreadable and not well formatted and the table of parameters with values is missing

6 - All the other equations in the paper are not easily readable

7 - Rearrange the paper so as to distinguish the Results from the discussion. And make a more substantial conclusion.

Author Response

See the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The study presented on this current and crucial topic is really interesting and well conducted, and in my opinion the paper is suitable for publication on Healthcare journal. However, it is necessary to make some minor changes to the manuscript, to arrange some aspects before publication.

General points:

• There are many problems in the text layout (numbers inside the text, missing spaces between words, wrong disposition of characters in formulas or tables, lost of the text justification in some parts, incorrect layout of the references, etc.), maybe due to the pdf conversion, but they need to be checked.
• There are many sentences within the manuscript that have to be checked as English language appears not formally correct, or the meaning is not completely clear: a revision of the English text made by an expert is strongly recommended.

Specific points:

Abstract

• Lines 15-18: There are some numbers to remove at the end of these lines.
• Line 24: “Further, this paper…”; it would be better “Further, this study…”.

Keywords

• The keyword “Data” seems too generic.
• Maybe it’s better the plural form: “Prevention measures”.

Introduction

• Also here there are some useless numbers inserted by mistake within the text; in particular, check lines 32, 33, 41, 55 and 83.
• Lines 52-55: “The infection status of COVID-19 has a latent period, and can be indirectly infected, that is, through the treatment of COVID-19 medical waste, objects contacted by the infected person, and the object has therapeutic bacteria”. Please check this sentence, as it is not completely clear. Moreover, this paper is about viruses and not bacteria, so the last word used seems not appropriate.
• Lines 70-71: “…the infected person has touched, and has the object of treating bacteria”. Please check this part of the sentence, as it seems not formally correct and the meaning is not clear. Again, the authors used the term “bacteria” instead of “viruses”.
• Lines 74-75: “The risk assessment of rework during the pandemic is a multi-level comprehensive evaluation problem which involving many influencing factors”. Please check and correct the sentence. Regarding the term “rework”, see the note reported after, commenting paragraph 2.
• Lines 83-84: “The general situation of the pandemic situation in China is given in Section 0”. Please rearrange the sentence avoiding repetitions.
• Line 84: “conscious model” should be “consciousness model”.
• Lines 84-86: Check and correct the numbers of the sections cited. And why start from 0 and not from 1?

1. Overview of the pandemic transmission in China

• Lines 102-103: Could you report the number of inhabitants of Wuhan city?
• Lines 105-106: “From 23^rd Jan 2020, Wuhan city was closed where all the 105 traffic with the outside were cut off, announced by the Government”. Please check and rearrange this sentence.
• Line 113: “meantime” is one single word.
• Lines 133-135: “For instance, one of the authors who has infected NCP due to contact people from Wuhan on the 22^th Jan 2020 at a 114 gathering has just discharged from the hospital on the 16^th Feb 2020”. Please check and rearrange this sentence.
• Line 136: “expect Wuhan” should be “except Wuhan”.
• Lines 138-139: “…the effectiveness of closure of Wuhan from stopping the virus spread…”. Please check and correct this sentence, as it seems not correct.
• Line 147: “The death of Hubei Province is much higher…”; maybe it should be “The death rate…”.
• Line 155: Missing space “facilitiesand”.

1. The consciousness-based SEIR model based propagation of COVID-19

• Line 173: Check the title of this section, particularly the repetition of the term “based”.
• Lines 174-181: please check and rearrange all this part, particularly the split in two points.
• Line 181: “the latent or infected objects”. Contaminated objects are "vehicles", or not; how is it possible to distinguish between latent and infected objects, as if they were living organisms?
• Line 185: Again “bacteria”. If you want to use a generic term, you can talk about “microorganisms” and not “bacteria”, because the latter belong to a biological group that does not include viruses.
• Lines 189-190: “The exposed (E) is also infectious and more infectious than the infective (I)”. Please clarify better this concept.
• Line 192: An explicit reference to Table 1 is needed also for the description of the symbols used in the following lines.
• Line 194: In conclusions (1) and (2) UI, AI, UE, AE should be superseded.
• Line 195: “0 <= k”, this definition should be reverted in “k >= 0”.
• Lines 196-197: “…the susceptible is conscious and inconscious…”. Check and correct this apparent non-sense.
• Lines 201-211: The formulas have meaningless symbols, probably due to the transformation into pdf.
• Lines 238-239: “k means the ratio of the infection rate of the unconscious infection to the conscious infection rate”. Please explain better this parameter, this way is not clear.
• Line 242: “The parameter value is the same as 1),…”. It is not clear and not linked with what follows.
• Line 247: “azards” should be “hazards”.
• Lines 248-253: Please check and rearrange this part, amending the mistakes and explaining better the interpretation of the two parameters σ₁ and σ₂.
• Line 258 + line 271: “This requires that people in the early stage of the virus, to block the possible indirect infection pathway, in order to reduce the number of infections”. Please check and correct this sentence.
• Line 272: “repair rate”. Please clarify this concept.

2. Potential risk assessment of rework during epidemic period based on entropy-fuzzy factor

• You should define and explain the concept of “rework”, or replace it with a more appropriate term, such as “resumption of work” or “restart of work” or “work resumption” (as in Table 2) or “work restoration” (as at line 292).
• Could you supply a reference also for EPOR model?
• Lines 294-295: “The process of the EPOR model establishment are described as follows”. Please correct this sentence.
• Lines 297-299: The second row in Table 2 counts six factors, not 25! Maybe you wanted to say that the 2^nd level considers all the risk factors reported, but you have to explain this point in a clearer way.
• Lines 308-309: Formulas (3), (4) and (5) are not readable because of the wrong layout.
• Line 323: “rario” should be “ratio”.
• (7) should probably be a matrix, but its layout must be adjusted to become readable.

3. Conclusion

• Here the authors comment only the findings of section 2, but interesting results are shown also in sections 0 and 1, that are equally important to resume.
• Line 340: there is an incomprehensible “4”

References

• Check and correct the numbers of the references, as the order of appearance in the text is not sequential (for instance, ref. [12] is cited for the first time at line 181, after ref. [15] at line 152).
• The layout of the references must be checked and arranged, as they are not all correctly disposed (see general point).

Figures

• Figure 1: In the blue caption, the term “death” seems not correct, you should maybe use “deaths” or “dead”; moreover, is it possible to indicate on the map the central cities of China, such as Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou?
• Figure 2: The term “Population” as a title for y axis seems not appropriate; maybe it’s better “Cases”.
• Figure 3: Also for these two graphs “Cases” is better than “Population” for y axis; moreover, the last sentence (It can be seen from Fig. 3(b) that the epidemic situation in Wuhan is much more serious than those in Xiangyang and Huanggang) is not appropriate in the figure caption, it should be moved to the main text.
• Figure 5: Again “Population” to be changed for y axis; moreover, the title of this figure must be checked, as there are some mistakes (provinves, non-hubei).
• Figure 6: The caption contains also some comments, not appropriate here; please amend.
• Figure 7: The two probability equations β^AI I + β^AE E + γ₂ and β^UI I + β^UE E + γ₁ must be exchanged, as they are in the wrong position of the diagram. Moreover, It should be clarified how it is possible σ1 directly from S^A to S^U, without passing through E, I and R; in other terms, how can a susceptible subject who was aware of the risks forget everything? On the other hand, it is possible that a healed subject returns susceptible after months (due to the phenomenon μ) and is not aware of it, so that he/she behaves without precautions, just like a S^U
• Figure 8: The authors should clarify why R(t) decreases from day 30 to day 80 due to the progressive loss of immunity (μ), and then ceases to decrease due to a phenomenon that should increase over the time. And also why, at the same time, S^A(t) no longer increases after day 80, although the phenomenon of the progressive loss of immunity (μ) remains. Probably because the equilibrium point has been reached and the subjects who lose immunity are replaced by the new convalescents, but this should be clarified in the text describing this figure.
• Figure 9: Check and arrange the caption of this figure.

Tables

• Table 1: In this table there are not only parameters, but also variables; there is a problem in the column of parameters, maybe due to the pdf conversion; in addition, why didn’t you include in this table also the parameters k and k₁? Finally, μ and σ could be misleading as symbols for a probability, as they are usually used to indicate the mean and the standard deviation, respectively.
• Table 2: The first row is in bold as it was a headline, but it isn’t; maybe there should be a headline that is missing? Or maybe the intention was to give evidence to the first row? Moreover, the semicolon (;) after the last sub-factor of each group is useless.
• Table 3: Please specify that the values in this table are percentages (or weights).

Author Response

see the attachment. Thereview coments and the revised manuscript is attached. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

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.