Additionally, WASA has not been able to complete its long-promised metering programme, with only 3 percent of residential customers and 80 percent of commercial customers metered thus far. To begin with, the authority is encumbered by an ageing network of pipelines, with numerous leaks hindering its ability to provide a regular water supply throughout the country. The plight of WASA is beyond a doubt, the most desperate among the country’s utilities. However, given the importance of this utility to society and government’s tight fiscal resources, on which it and other utilities have become heavily reliant, urgent action is required. Consequently, it may be very difficult to gain widespread buy-in for such an initiative. There are several hard decisions that will have to be made, including the prospect of increasing rates to consumers. From the onset, it must be acknowledged that it will not be a simple task to address the issues confronting WASA. While T&TEC’s performance has improved appreciably over the last 10 years or so, the plight of WASA continues to be a cause of major worry and a source of pain to many, many citizens. This is understandable given the importance of these two organisations to our everyday lives and the continual, well-ventilated challenges they face. On this basis, implications for research and practice are provided.When we hear the words ‘public utilities,’ it is natural for many of us to immediately think about the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) and the Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission (T&TEC). Overall, reinforcing self-efficacy was carved out as the most important resilience factor against perceiving high levels of stress. This finding gives reason to believe that individuals may disclose that they are less vulnerable to COVID-19, fostering their self-efficacy, but still accept that stressing factors such as economic and social consequences apply. Only perceived invulnerability elicited opposite effects on stress, increasing stress directly but decreasing stress indirectly by increasing self-efficacy. Except for information seeking, which positively affected perceived stress, self-efficacy partially mediates all other COVID-19 related beliefs (perceptions of disruption, health importance and response effectiveness) in conjunction with their direct effects. It is found that stress perception is most strongly affected by self-efficacy and perceived disruption. After conducting a series of tests and checks via Confirmatory Factor Analyses, linear modelling and mediation analyses with bootstrapping were applied to test direct and mediation hypotheses. From a large sample of 23,629, data were assessed using validated multi-item measures for seven COVID-19 related beliefs, self-efficacy and perceived stress. Our study aims to determine if the various COVID-19 related beliefs (information seeking invulnerability disruption health importance and response effectiveness) are predictors of perceived stress and if self-efficacy acts as a mediator in reducing perceived COVID-19 related stress. The impact that COVID-19 had on individuals globally has been immense.
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