Access to Water and the SARs-Cov-2 Pandemic: Opportunities and Threats in a Post-Pandemic Era for sub-Saharan Africa

The emergence of SARs-Cov-2 has severely impacted on the progress made so far on the sustainable development goals in SSA. The current ineffective water and healthcare sectors in many African countries could serve as a deterrent to an impending crisis. This mini review aims to highlight the opportunities and threats to the water and healthcare sector in a post pandemic era. Recent studies indicate that the virus have been found in water bodies including wastewater and sewage and this could serve as a potential medium of mutation of the virus. In addition, SSA have poor waste management implementation and sanitation especially within rural and densely populated areas. This coupled with lack of adequate supply of potable water can see SSA fall back in achieving the SDGs. The struggle against climate change and recently Covid-19 will devastate socio-economic development of many countries within the SSA region. Climate change has impacted on water accessibility and quality and Covid-19 requires adequate water supply to reduce human-to-human transmission. This will see a severe stress on already existing stresses in the water and health sectors which can eventually led to a system collapse. Urgent attention is therefore required through the design and implementation of programs aimed at building resilience to climate impacts and prepare for future pandemics

An Accuracy-preserving Block Hybrid Algorithm for the Integration of Second-order Physical Systems with Oscillatory Solutions

It is a known fact that in most cases, to integrate an oscillatory problem, higher order A-stable methods are often needed. This is because such problems are characterized by stiffness, chaos and damping, thus making them tedious to solve. However, in this research, an accuracy-preserving relatively lower order Block Hybrid Algorithm (BHA) is proposed for solution of second-order physical systems with oscillatory solutions. The sixth order algorithm was derived using interpolation and collocation of power series within a single step interval [tn; tn+1]. In order to circumvent the Dahlquist-barrier and also obtain an accuracy-preserving algorithm, four o-step points were incorporated within the single step interval. A number of special cases of oscillatory problems were solved using the proposed method and the results obtained clearly showed that it outperformed other existing methods we compared our results with even though the BHA is of lower order relative to such methods. Some of the second-order physical systems considered were the Kepler, Bessel and damped problems. Some important properties of the BHA were also analyzed and the results of the analysis showed that it is consistent, zero-stable and convergent