Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-COV-2) is a novel virus that emerged in China in late 2019 and caused a pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The epidemic has largely been controlled in China since March 2020, but continues to inflict severe public health and socioeconomic burden in other parts of the world. One of the major reasons for China's success for the fight against the epidemic is the effectiveness of its health care system and enlightenment (awareness) programs which play a vital role in the control of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nigeria is currently witnessing a rapid increase of the epidemic likely due to its unsatisfactory health care system and inadequate awareness programs. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model to study the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 in Nigeria. Our model incorporates awareness programs and different hospitalization strategies for mild and severe cases, to assess the effect of public awareness on the dynamics of COVID-19 infection. We fit the model to the cumulative number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Nigeria from 29 March to 12 June 2020. We find that the epidemic could increase if awareness programs are not properly adopted. We presumed that the effect of awareness programs could be estimated. Further, our results suggest that the awareness programs and timely hospitalization of active cases are essential tools for effective control and mitigation of COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria and beyond. Finally, we perform sensitive analysis to point out the key parameters that should be considered to effectively control the epidemic.

Background: Since the first case of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Africa was detected on February 14, 2020, the cumulative confirmations reached 15 207 including 831 deaths by April 13, 2020. Africa has been described as one of the most vulnerable region with the COVID-19 infection during the initial phase of the outbreak, due to the fact that Africa is a great commercial partner of China and some other EU and American countries. Which result in large volume of travels by traders to the region more frequently and causing African countries face even bigger health threat during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the fact that the control and management of COVID-19 pandemic rely heavily on a country's health care system, and on average Africa has poor health care system which make it more vulnerable indicating a need for timely intervention to curtail the spread. In this paper, we estimate the exponential growth rate and basic reproduction number (R 0) of COVID-19 in Africa to show the potential of the virus to spread, and reveal the importance of sustaining stringent health measures to control the disease in Africa. Methods: We analyzed the initial phase of the epidemic of COVID-19 in Africa between 1 March and 13 April 2020, by using the simple exponential growth model. We examined the publicly available materials published by the WHO situation report to show the potential of COVID-19 to spread without sustaining strict health measures. The Poisson likelihood framework is adopted for data fitting and parameter estimation. We modelled the distribution of COVID-19 generation interval (GI) as Gamma distributions with a mean of 4.7 days and standard deviation of 2.9 days estimated from previous work, and compute the basic reproduction number. Results: We estimated the exponential growth rate as 0.22 per day (95% CI: 0.20-0.24), and the basic reproduction number, R 0 , as 2.37 (95% CI: 2.22-2.51) based on the assumption that the exponential growth starting from 1 March 2020. With an R 0 at 2.37, we quantified the instantaneous transmissibility of the outbreak by the time-varying effective reproductive number to show the potential of COVID-19 to spread across African region. Conclusions: The initial growth of COVID-19 cases in Africa was rapid and showed large variations across countries. Our estimates should be useful in preparedness planning against further spread of the COVID-19 epidemic in Africa.

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Communicated by: R. Anguelov MSC Classification: 92D25; 92D30 Some factors related to students behaviour are perceived to be important for academic failure. Such of these factors and some other factors contribute immensely to the problem of scholastic underachievement that is spreading among students of Kano University of Science and Technology, Wudil-Nigeria.Considering such a problem as a contagious disease, we propose a mathematical model to study how this problem is spread in Kano University of Science and Technology, Wudil campus. The model analysis reveals that the reproduction numbers are sufficient to predict whether the problem can persist in the campus environment. Indeed, endemic persistence occurs if the pattern of recruiting new members is through both transition and progression. The sensitivity analysis of the parameters of the model threshold quantities shows that reducing the rates of recruiting new students to weak class through both transition and progression is an effective measure of containing the problem.