Review Reports - The Impact of COVID-19 on Admissions and Management of Patients with Atrial Fibrillation Episodes in the Emergency Department

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript contains data of general interest to many emergency physicians. The authors convincingly showed that attendance to the Emergency Department by patients who developed atrial fibrillation (AF) was delayed during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and this delay was associated with a lower rate of success of quick cardioversion of atrial fibrillation.

I discerned that this manuscript would benefit from extensive editing, so I have made many suggestions for "edits". These are contained in the attached document.

I believe that if the authors accept my suggestions, then this manuscript will be much more "readable" and much more interesting to the prospective readership of this journal.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

REVIEWER 1

Dear Sir/Madam,

We wish to express our appreciation for the comments and suggestions for our manuscript entitled “The impact of COVID-19 on admissions and management of patients with atrial fibrillation episodes in the Emergency Department”. We have carefully revised the manuscript taking into consideration all the comments.

Language and Keywords

Thank you for that comment. Generally, we changed the manuscript according your suggestions Also the keywords were changed.

Methode

Thank you for that comment. We added more information regarding Copernicus Memorial Hospital:

The ED at the Copernicus Memorial Hospital in Lodz is the Regional Trauma Center for the Lodz voivodeship. Lodz is the principal city of the Lodz voivodeship, and has approximately 680,000 inhabitants. Copernicus Memorial Hospital is the principal hospital for Lodz. Its ED admission rate was approximately 2,000 per month, with an average hospital inpatient admission rate of 14%. The 30-day mortality was 3.2%.

Table 1 and 2

Thank you for that comment. We changed “VII-XII” into “July-December”

In conclusion, you recommended extra conclusion

Thank you for that comment. We added extra conclusion.

In table 3, The management of AF episodes in the studied EDs during Non-Pandemic Period and the Pandemic Periods - authors should state instead the non-proprietary name of this drug.

Thank you for that comment. The term of “Betablocker” was changed into “Beta blocker”. We changed names of “Rytmonorm” into the non-proprietary name of this drug - “Propafenone”.

In Figure 1, the title.

Thank you for improving the title of Figure 1. We changed the old one into new one according your suggestion.

References

Example: World Health Organization (WHO). Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard. https://covid19.who.int/ / (accessed on 11 May, 2021). 2. All other references should be as they are presented in the text

We changed all references with website adding a title of page and access date.

Best regards,

Dariusz Timler

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Please find attached phrasal and other corrections.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Sir/Madam,

Best regards,

Dariusz Timler