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Dear Dr. Klein and colleagues:
Thanks for further revising your manuscript based on the concerns raised by the reviewer. I now believe that your manuscript is suitable for publication. Congratulations! I look forward to seeing this work in print, and I anticipate it being an important resource for the community studying chikungunya outbreaks, particularly those on Reunion Island. Thanks again for choosing PeerJ to publish such important work.
Best,
-joe
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Paula Soares, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
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I had concerns with some of the phrases that were used in the previous version to describe the meaning of the findings. They have been addressed.
No further comments.
Dear Dr. Klein and colleagues:
Thanks for resubmitting your manuscript to PeerJ. While your manuscript is much improved, one of the original reviewers still has a major concern (two-parts). Please address these issues.
If these concerns are adequately addressed, your manuscript will certainly be close to publication. So please address these concerns ASAP and resubmit.
Good luck with your revision,
-joe
The writing and has been done professionally.
The modeling itself appears to have been competently executed.
As the authors now acknowledge in the new paragraph at the end of their Discussion (Section 4), their findings crucially depend on certain modeling assumptions that are now spelled out in that paragraph. I see two problems with these assumptions and the way they are presented.
1. The assumptions do not seem particularly plausible to me. While my guess here is no better than the author's, the main problem is that these assumptions have not been substantiated by references to the literature on actual mosquito behavior. Therefore the findings of this paper are only valid as an implication: "If we can assume that mosquito biting satisfies to a reasonable approximation the assumption spelled out in this paragraph, then we can deduce the following policy recommendations." As far as I can see, this implication has been validated by the paper, but the assumptions have not been experimentally confirmed. The implication itself would still be a valid finding for a mathematical modeling paper, but it needs to be clearly presented as such.
2. There is a mismatch between the categorical announcement of policy recommendation in the abstract and earlier parts of the paper, and the nature of the findings, that are only an implication, with experimentally unsubstantiated premises. This is misleading. The new paragraph is buried near the end of the paper. While the authors claim in their response that the last paragraph of the introduction now addresses the modeling assumptions, it does no such thing. It simply restates the model's prediction.
I must, unfortunately, conclude that the current presentation of the findings is outright misleading. If this publication is to have value as a contribution to the scientific literature, it needs to be clearly stated, in the abstract, that these conclusions were reached under certain assumptions about mosquito biting that await experimental verification, and these assumptions need to be clearly spelled out in a prominent place early in the paper.
The minor points that I had made in my previous review have been adequately addressed, but as you see from the previous item, my major objection still stands.
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The authors have answer all my concerns.
Dear Dr. Klein and colleagues:
Thanks for submitting your manuscript to PeerJ. I have now received two independent reviews of your work, and as you will see, the reviewers raised some concerns about the research. Despite this, the reviewers are optimistic about your work and the potential impact it will have on research communities studying chikungunya outbreaks, particular those on Reunion Island. Thus, I encourage you to revise your manuscript, accordingly, taking into account all of the concerns raised by both reviewers.
I look forward to seeing your revision, and thanks again for submitting your work to PeerJ.
Good luck with your revision,
-joe
The article is professionally written in good English.
While the references are adequate, the organization of the literature review is a bit confusing. [21] is a book that outlines the state of the art of the field of behavioral epidemiology at the time it was written; this should be made more explicit in line 66 of page 3, which right now sounds a bit like if [21] had started it all. Line 83 at the same page mentions [39] in the context of statistical physics, but this is just part of a flashy tile of this article. In reality, this is really an extensive and exhaustive survey of the parts (777 references in all) of behavioral epidemiology that most closely relate to vaccination games.
It is not clear whether Section 2 contains any novelty. It should be made explicit whether and to what extent it goes beyond a condensed review of [40]. This should be made explicit.
Also, the results of subsections 3.1 and and 3.2 should be juxtaposed more clearly, perhaps by combining Figures 3 and 4 into one figure, so that it becomes visually obvious that the Nash equilibrium fall short of the societally optimal vaccination coverage.
The authors study meaningful questions and their methodology for analyzing the model appear to be sound and professionally executed.
However, some important information is missing, for example, it is not being explicitly said whether the graphs in Figure 4 rely on a numerical solver for finding the relevant equilibria, as I believe they would need to.
While my comments pertaining to points 1 and 2 can be addressed by minor modification, here I have a major issue:
Why is it that the two interventions considered by the authors lead to two qualitatively different predictions? The authors appear to have completely overlooked this question, but it is an absolutely crucial one.
Let's take the point of view of a mosquito: In both cases it is faced with removal of potential blood meals. Either because the human resource has become unapproachable due to repellent, or has been removed to another location. In both cases the mosquito can either continue its search for another human provider of a blood meal until it succeeds, or content itself without a meal of human blood. These scenarios would translate differently into differential equations. The authors have essentially shown (among other things and under certain assumptions about the costs) that in the second scenario the societally optimal strategy is to remove enough humans (by using insect repellent) to achieve herd immunity, while in the first scenario the cost of removing more humans will not lower the overall cost to society, as a higher proportion of the remaining susceptibles will eventually experience infection. I find this quite interesting and it should be the major result of this paper.
But this issue is not addressed at all. Instead, the authors set up their differential equations in such a way that insecticide repellent would apparently discourage mosquitoes from searching better-smelling humans that they might feed on [this is essentially what (12) translates into], while having fewer humans around overall would still make them search until they succeed [translate (19) and the first line of (22)]. I find this highly implausible. Insect repellent does not kill or disable mosquitoes, it only drives them away from particular humans.
Therefore I cannot recommend publication of the paper in its current form.
As you saw from point 3, I find some assumptions of your model implausible and did not recommend publication of this paper.
However, I believe that you have discovered, perhaps inadvertently, something that to the best of my knowledge has not yet been reported in the literature: The two different assumptions about mosquito behavior that I outlined above lead to two qualitatively different optimal strategies. While I appreciate the care you took with using realistic parameters for a particular biological system to the extent possible,
I believe this is a more general finding about driving mechanisms and calls for a more general, abstract, treatment. Such a paper might be a very valuable addition to the literature.
On the more empirical side: I don't know which assumption about mosquito behavior is (more) realistic. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between; perhaps there are empirical studies of this (in this case they should be cited); if not, such should be performed (in which case this should be recommended in your conclusions) .
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Optimal Voluntary and Mandatory Insect Repellent Usage and Emigration Strategies to Control the Chikungunya Outbreak on Reunion Island
Sylvia R. M. Klein, Alex O. Foster, David A. Feagins, Jonathan T. Rowell, and Igor V. Erovenko
The authors investigated the potential for two intervention measures for under voluntary and mandatory protocols to control Chikungunya disease on Reunion Island when there is a risk of the disease becoming endemic.
General comment: I found the manuscript easy to read and follow and can easily be replicated. I like the fact that the authors included their codes. I recommend it for publication subject to the revision below.
Specific comments
Line 129: remove the extra “the”
Line 131: capitalize “table 1”
Equation 1: Give an explanation as to why disease-related dead is left out and not accounted for. The authors noted in the introduction 200 people dead from the disease on the Island.
Line 139: Do the authors expect to get a different result if this simplification is no made?
Line 153: Which of the two equilibria are the authors referring to?
Line 159: What is the justification for the use of repellant as a control measure?
Line 160: Revise the order of the papers cited.
Equation 10: The authors should give an explanation of this equation. It is not immediately clear from the description given. The authors should give explanation as given in one of Erovenko’s previous papers.
Equation 13: The derivative of equation 12 is not this simple expression. Are Z^* and N^*constant? Are these not functions of r? They contain beta_1 = beta_1(r). Or am I missing something?
Line 206: replace “stopping” with “stop”.
Equation 22: It is not clear how this equilibrium is greatly different from the first equilibrium in equation 6, the model with emigration is the same as equation 1 except for the addition omega from the S class.
Line 296: “resulting in a greater proportion”. Am I missing something here? How is this so? The magnitude of I/N is 10^(-4).
Line 327: “Are shown in Figure 8”. Discuss the graphs as was done for Figure 9. There are four panels in the figure, what do they say individually?
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