Salt-tolerant bacteria with an appetite for sludge make biodegradable plastics

Using a bacterial strain found in mangroves, Texas A&M researchers have uncovered a low-cost, sustainable method for producing bioplastics from sewage sludge and wastewater

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

Research News

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IMAGE: ZOBELLELLA DENITRIFICANS ZD1 BACTERIA FEED ON SLUDGE (BOTH SHOWN IN TEST TUBE) TO MAKE BIODEGRADE BIOPLASTICS. view more 

CREDIT: DR. KUNG-HUI (BELLA) CHU

The United States generates seven million tons of sewage sludge annually, enough to fill 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools. While a portion of this waste is repurposed for manure and other land applications, a substantial amount is still disposed of in landfills. In a new study, Texas A&M University researchers have uncovered an efficient way to use leftover sludge to make biodegradable plastics.

In the September issue of the journal American Chemical Society (ACS) Omega, the researchers report that the bacterium Zobellella denitrificans ZD1, found in mangroves, can consume sludge and wastewater to produce polyhydroxybutyrate, a type of biopolymer that can be used in lieu of petroleum-based plastics. In addition to reducing the burden on landfills and the environment, the researchers said Zobellella denitrificans ZD1 offers a way to cut down upstream costs for bioplastics manufacturing, a step toward making them more competitively priced against regular plastics.

"The price of raw materials to cultivate biopolymer-producing bacteria accounts for 25-45% of the total production cost of manufacturing bioplastics. Certainly, this cost can be greatly reduced if we can tap into an alternate resource that is cheaper and readily obtainable," said Kung-Hui (Bella) Chu, professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "We have demonstrated a potential way to use municipal wastewater-activated sludge and agri- and aqua-culture industrial wastewater to make biodegradable plastics. Furthermore, the bacterial strain does not require elaborate sterilization processes to prevent contamination from other microbes, further cutting down operating and production costs of bioplastics."

Polyhydroxybutyrate, an emerging class of bioplastics, is produced by several bacterial species when they experience an imbalance of nutrients in their environment. This polymer acts as the bacteria's supplemental energy reserves, similar to fat deposits in animals. In particular, an abundance of carbon sources and a depletion of either nitrogen, phosphorous or oxygen, cause bacteria to erratically consume their carbon sources and produce polyhydroxybutyrate as a stress response.

One such medium that can force bacteria to make polyhydroxybutyrate is crude glycerol, a byproduct of biodiesel manufacturing. Crude glycerol is rich in carbon and has no nitrogen, making it a suitable raw material for making bioplastics. However, crude glycerol contains impurities such as fatty acids, salts and methanol, which can prohibit bacterial growth. Like crude glycerol, sludge from wastewater also has many of the same fatty acids and salts. Chu said that the effects of these fatty acids on bacterial growth and, consequently, polyhydroxybutyrate production had not yet been examined.

"There is a multitude of bacterial species that make polyhydroxybutyrate, but only a few that can survive in high-salt environments and even fewer among those strains can produce polyhydroxybutyrate from pure glycerol," Chu said. "We looked at the possibility of whether these salt-tolerating strains can also grow on crude glycerol and wastewater."

For their study, Chu and her team chose the Zobellella denitrificans ZD1, whose natural habitat is the salt waters of mangroves. They then tested the growth and the ability of this bacteria to produce polyhydroxybutyrate in pure glycerol. The researchers also repeated the same experiments with other bacterial strains that are known producers of polyhydroxybutyrate. They found that Zobellella denitrificans DZ1 was able to thrive in pure glycerol and produced the maximum amount of polyhydroxybutyrate in proportion to its weight without water.

Next, the team tested the growth and ability of Zobellella denitrificans ZD1 to produce polyhydroxybutyrate in glycerol containing salt and fatty acids. They found that even in these conditions, it produced polyhydroxybutyrate efficiently, even under balanced nutrient conditions. When they repeated the experiments in samples of high-strength synthetic wastewater and wastewater-activated sludge, they found the bacteria was still able to make polyhydroxybutyrate, although at quantities lower than if they were in crude glycerol.

Chu noted that by leveraging Zobellella denitrificans ZD1 tolerance for salty environments, expensive sterilization processes that are normally needed when working with other strains of bacteria could be avoided.

"Zobellella denitrificans ZD1 natural preference for salinity is fantastic because we can, if needed, tweak the chemical composition of the waste by just adding common salts. This environment would be toxic for other strains of bacteria," she said. "So, we are offering a low cost, a sustainable method to make bioplastics and another way to repurpose biowastes that are costly to dispose of."

###

Other contributors to this research include Fahad Asiri, Chih-Hung Chen, Myung Hwangbo and Yiru Shao from the civil and environmental engineering department at Texas A&M.

This research is supported by the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, the Ministry of Higher Education of Kuwait Fellowship and the fellowship from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan.

Sweden faces a ‘terrible’ reality as health-care workers quit 

Updated: Dec. 14, 2020 



‘I talked to members in August who said they would resign because it was the only way to get some time off and recover. We see high rates of sickness, symptoms of exhaustion and members who have been infected.’

That’s Sineva Ribeiro, the chairwoman of the Swedish Association of Health Professionals, talking to Bloomberg about the “terrible” situation in Sweden as coronavirus infections continue to spread.

She explained that there was “a shortage of specialist nurses, including at ICUs,” even before the pandemic hit back in March. With Stockholm’s intensive care capacity reaching 99% last week, the capital city is calling for outside help to handle the increasing number of patients.

As you can see from this chart, the trend is troubling:



Bloomberg highlighted a survey by broadcaster TV4 showing 13 of Sweden’s 21 regions saw a jump in resignations in the health-care profession from a year ago, at as many as 500 a month.

“In a work environment where you are so tired, the risk of mistakes increases,” Ribeiro said in the interview. “And those mistakes can lead to patients dying.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. still holds the highest case total in the world at 16.26 million, with almost 300,000 deaths, which is roughly a fifth of the global totals, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University. There were a record 109,331 COVID-19 patients in U.S. hospitals on Sunday, topping the record of 108,487 set a day earlier.

Josh Brown wants you to send this election conspiracy chart to ‘the most insane people you know’

 Dec. 15, 2020 By Shawn Langlois

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, saluting in this Caracas mural as the current embattled leader Nicolás Maduro holds a child, has been dead since 2013, yet he plays a role in at least one conspiracy theory about the U.S. election last month. 

FEDERICO PARRA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Dominion Resources→”Minions”→Illumination Entertainment→the Illumanati→”Deep State.” Of course! Just follow the money, the fraud and the fake news. It all makes perfect sense.

At least to “the most insane people you know,” in the words of Ritholtz Wealth Management adviser Josh Brown, who flagged this chart from JPMorgan JPM, +1.71% strategist Michael Cembalest.

Brown described the chart as Cembalest’s “guide to understanding the massive wave of election fraud that’s currently threatening our democracy,” and he urged readers of his popular Reformed Broker blog to “take this seriously before the pizza parlor baby-eaters take over.”

As for Cembalest, well, he was just having some fun.

“To see if I could understand the election process more clearly,” he told clients in a note, “I fed swing-state voter data, news stories and select Twitter feeds into our neural network model.”

While his visual is “obviously satire,” Cembalest acknowledged that he believes the election process still raises some questions that should be answered going forward..

“A post-mortem on how elections are conducted with large absentee ballot shares is a good idea,” he wrote. “And I also think the Supreme Court should clarify what state legislatures and courts can and cannot do regarding election law changes.”

Having said all that, is still possible, even now that the Electoral College has cast 306 votes for Joe Biden and even Mitch McConnell and Vladimir Putin have recognized him as president-elect? “Yes, technically,” Cembalest said, “but it would take a series of highly unlikely and improbable events.”

The Electoral College formally declared Joe Biden president-elect Monday, after California cast its 55 votes for the former vice president and put him beyond the 270 vote threshold needed to secure victory.
.
About the Author

Shawn Langlois is an editor and writer for MarketWatch in Los Angeles.

When you can't afford to go on lockdown

Lower rates of self-isolation were observed in low-income areas

NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

Research News

 

Researchers at HSE University and Lomonosov Moscow State University analyzed data on Russians' movements during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their analysis showed that residents of lower-income municipalities self-isolated less compared to residents of higher-income cities. The findings were published in the journal Environment and Planning A.

Restrictions on population mobility reduce the frequency with which infected people come into contact with uninfected ones, thereby reducing infection rates and the consequences of the pandemic. However, the effectiveness of these measures depends on the extent to which they are observed. The most reliable way to determine this was to assess citizens' levels of mobility.

The researchers decided to find out what impact the level of wages has on citizens' mobility. To do this, they analyzed Yandex data on the share of people leaving the immediate vicinity of their homes from early March to late June. The sample included 308 Russian municipalities, which were divided into 10 groups according to residents' level of wages.

At the end of March, a regime of "non-working days" was introduced in Russia, followed by the closure of most companies and public transport. Already in the first week, the main mobility trend emerged: residents of the richest cities moved around the city 1.5-2 times less compared to residents of the poorest municipalities in the sample.

After the «non-working days» period was extended by a month, isolation rates in high- and middle-income cities fell by a third and the gap between rich and poor municipalities narrowed. It is likely that residents of wealthier areas also started looking for ways to maintain their incomes rather than staying at home. In poorer cities, the decline in mobility was smaller but lasted much longer. This can be explained by the fact that these areas have greater shares of residents working in the public sector, and employees of this sector received compensation from the state for their loss of wages.

When the national "non-working days" period ended, the trend reversed, with residents in wealthy cities returning more quickly to pre-isolation levels of mobility than those in poorer municipalities. As a result, the mobility curve of residents of poor areas is U-shaped, characteristic of protracted crises, while the curves of wealthy medium-sized municipalities are more like V-shaped.

The authors cite weak state assistance for citizens and businesses as a possible reason for these trends.

'The more vulnerable areas were de facto deprived of the opportunity to maintain a safe routine due to the need to maintain a minimum wage level on their own,' says Ruslan Dokhov, Senior Lecturer at HSE University.

###

FTC orders tech giants to provide details of how they collect data, and what effects they have on children

Regulators plan report that ‘will lift the hood on the social media and video streaming firms’

Published: Dec. 14, 2020 By Associated Press

Some of the biggest names in tech are facing further government scrutiny. 

AFP VIA GETTY 

WASHINGTON — Federal regulators are ordering Facebook FB, -1.43%, Twitter TWTR, +0.12%, Amazon AMZN, -0.58%, TikTok’s parent and five other social media companies to provide detailed information on how they collect and use consumers’ personal data and how their practices affect children and teens.

The Federal Trade Commission’s action announced Monday goes to the heart of the tech industry’s lucrative business model: harvesting data from platform users and making it available to online advertisers so they can pinpoint specific consumers to target.


The agency plans to use the information, due in 45 days, for a comprehensive study.

The other five companies are Reddit, Snap SNAP, +0.30%, Discord, WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, and Alphabet’s GOOGL, -0.40% GOOG, -0.34% YouTube.

Regulators and lawmakers are increasingly weaving their concerns over data power and privacy into their investigations of Big Tech companies’ market dominance.

Read: Big Tech has an antitrust target on its back. Here’s why that should concern investors


When the FTC and 48 states and districts filed landmark antitrust lawsuits against Facebook last week, accusing it of abusing its market power to crush smaller competitors, they also alleged that the company’s conduct has harmed consumers’ data privacy.

Facebook, the largest social network, gets the bulk of its revenue — which reached $70.7 billion last year — from online ads.

With its new request, the FTC wants to know how social media and video streaming services collect, use and track consumers’ personal and demographic information, how they decide which ads and other content are shown to consumers, whether they apply algorithms or data analytics to personal information, how they measure and promote user engagement and how their practices affect children and teens.

“Never before has there been an industry capable of surveilling and monetizing so much of our personal lives,” three of the five FTC commissioners said in a statement. They said the planned study “will lift the hood on the social media and video streaming firms to carefully study their engines.”


Twitter said in a statement, “We’re working, as we always do, to ensure the FTC has the information it needs to understand how Twitter operates its services.”

Support has grown in Congress for a national privacy law that could sharply rein in the ability of the biggest tech companies to collect and make money from users’ personal data. Legislation could gain steam in the new Congress next year with support from the Biden administration.

The FTC fined Facebook $5 billion last year for alleged privacy violations and instituted new oversight and restrictions on its business. The fine was the largest the agency had ever levied on a tech company, although it had no visible impact on Facebook’s business.

Also last year, YouTube was fined $170 million — $136 million by the FTC and $34 million by New York state — to settle allegations that it collected children’s personal data without their parents’ c

Apollo Considers Higher Offer for Canadian Casino Owner

Kevin Orland
Mon, December 14, 2020, 


(Bloomberg) -- Apollo Global Management Inc. is mulling an increase to its $2.5 billion takeover bid for Great Canadian Gaming Corp. but may walk away from the deal if it can’t win approval at an upcoming shareholder meeting, according to people familiar with the matter.

The private equity firm has been contemplating its strategy because the C$39-a-share offer has run into opposition from some of Great Canadian’s largest shareholders. At the same time, Apollo is wary of overpaying because of the risks the pandemic poses to the gaming industry, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private negotiations.

Great Canadian shares climbed 1.4% to C$36.88 as of 9:48 a.m. on Monday in Toronto.

Apollo indicated during negotiations with the company in August that it was considering an offer of C$38 to C$41 per share, according to documents filed with securities regulators. A revised bid would likely stay within that range, one of the people said. A representative of New York-based Apollo declined to comment.

Great Canadian said last week it’s temporarily shutting another casino because of Covid-19 orders by the government of Ontario, leaving 19 of its 26 properties closed.

Apollo’s price for Great Canadian came under fire soon after it was unveiled last month, with shareholders including BloombergSen Inc. and Burgundy Asset Management Ltd. publicly opposing the deal. The investors say the offer undervalues the company and takes advantage of the drop in the share price since the pandemic disrupted Great Canadian’s operations.

Great Canadian shares traded as high as C$45.80 in February and closed at C$36.38 on Friday. The stock has fallen the past two weeks amid pessimism that a deal will be done.

Deal news website CTFN reported last month that holders have said any price less than C$70 a share won’t be acceptable.

Apollo isn’t willing to go that far because the Covid-19 pandemic may have permanently impaired some of Great Canadian’s value, the people said. The firm would rather walk away from the deal if it’s not approved by shareholders at a Dec. 23 meeting than overpay, they said.

Representatives of BloombergSen and Burgundy didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. A representative of CI Financial Corp., another large Great Canadian shareholder, declined to comment. BloombergSen is a Toronto-based hedge fund that owns almost 14% of Great Canadian, according to regulatory filings. It isn’t affiliated with Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.

Apollo has previously defended its offer, which has been approved by Great Canadian’s board, saying it delivers “significant and immediate value” to shareholders despite the negative effects of the pandemic.

Founded in 1982, Toronto-listed Great Canadian operates gaming, entertainment and hospitality facilities in four Canadian provinces.



©2020 Bloomberg L.P

WHO KILLED HIM?!

Ex-Hill Staffer Linked to Veselnitskaya Dies Suddenly After Fall Near His Home


Nico Hines
Mon, December 14, 2020, 
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty/Handout

The longtime aide to “Putin’s Congressman” Dana Rohrabacher died suddenly from a head injury over the weekend.

Paul Behrends was found by emergency responders close to his home on Friday night with severe head trauma. He was taken to a local hospital where surgeons fought to save him, but he passed away on Saturday, according to a spokesman for Rohrabacher.

Behrends was a controversial figure on Capitol Hill who lost his job as staff director for the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee after The Daily Beast reported on his links to Trump Tower lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya’s operation in the U.S.


GOP Lawmaker Got Direction From Moscow, Took It Back to D.C.

Rohrabacher’s former congressional spokesman Ken Grubbs told The Daily Beast that Behrends died at the hospital. “I did actually call Dana and he confirmed it,” he said. “What I’ve heard is that he slipped… hit his head, and died in surgery.”

Grubbs said there was no reason to think anything suspicious had happened to Behrends or that there was any link to his associations with Russia. “No, no, not at all,” he said.

Behrends’ son Josef Behrends told The Daily Beast that no one had seen his father fall at around 10 p.m. on Friday night but that his older brother, also called Paul, had rushed to the scene just four blocks from the family home when police came to the house.

“He was walking through the neighborhood and then he went to the hospital from there,” he said. “And then he passed away on Saturday. Early morning.”

Behrends made headlines for the first time in July 2017, after Veselnitskaya’s explosive June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., and then Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was exposed. The meeting subsequently shone a light on Behrends’ own Russian entanglements.

Behrends had traveled to Moscow with Rohrabacher in April 2016, a few months before that meeting. In Russia, they were given a document from the Prosecutor General’s Office marked “confidential,” which included details of the Kremlin’s battle against U.S. sanctions and a pro-Kremlin propaganda movie.

When they returned to D.C., Rohrabacher cited those Kremlin’s talking points as he delayed the passage of the Global Magnitsky Act.

Behrends then worked alongside Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin—a Soviet army veteran who accompanied Veselnitskaya to the notorious Trump Tower meeting—to help deliver some of the suggestions made in Moscow. Veselnitskaya was later indicted by the U.S. for allegedly colluding with Russian officials to obstruct justice in an American court case.

They worked together to organize a subcommittee hearing that would call the director of the propaganda movie as well as other witnesses who were sympathetic to President Putin. The hearing, which was set to re-examine U.S. sanctions against Russia, was eventually quashed and replaced by a full committee hearing on Russia. Rohrabacher still succeeded in approvingly comparing President Trump to Putin and submitting testimony that claimed Russia was not behind the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent who was poisoned with a radioactive isotope in London.

After the hearing, Behrends, Rohrabacher, Akhmetshin, and Veselnitskaya had dinner at the Capitol Hill Club, a private members’ club frequented by Republicans.

It was the next day that Kevin McCarthy, who was House majority leader at the time, was recorded at a GOP meeting saying: “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” When colleagues laughed, he was heard on tape saying: “Swear to God.”

A day after these events were recounted in articles at The Daily Beast and The Atlantic, a spokesman for the House Foreign Affairs Committee said: “Paul Behrends no longer works at the committee.”

After being ousted from the subcommittee role, Behrends continued to work closely with Rohrabacher, who was later defeated in the 2018 midterms. Behrends, whose political career began as an intern for Rohrabacher in the 1990s, was most recently a partner at Rohrabacher’s lobbying firm R&B Strategies.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Iran's president says country would rejoin nuclear deal within an hour of U.S. signing on

HEY JOE WHERE ARE YOU GOING WITH THAT DEAL 

IN YOUR HAND

Catherine Garcia
Mon, December 14, 2020, 

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Monday said if the United States returns to the Iran nuclear deal, his country will follow within an hour.

The deal was made during the Obama administration in 2015, lifting sanctions on Tehran in exchange for Iran reducing its uranium stockpile and dismantling its centrifuges. Rouhani said he will not discuss any changes to the accord or restrictions on Iran's ballistic missile program, The Guardian reports.

President Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, and Rouhani made his comments on the same day the Trump administration sanctioned two Iranian intelligence officials for allegedly playing a role in the 2007 disappearance and presumed death of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson. President-elect Joe Biden has said he will rejoin the deal, believing it is one way to avert a nuclear crisis in the Middle

Investigation underway into cause of hundreds of dead seals in Caspian Sea

Maria Georgieva
Mon, December 14, 2020

A dead Caspian seal in Dagestan - Musa Salgereyev /TASS

Russian authorities said they are investigating the death of nearly 300 endangered seals, including pregnant females, that have been found washed up on the shores of the Caspian Sea since December 6.

On Monday, the state fisheries agency in Dagestan, told Russian state media that 23 more seals had been discovered at the mouth of the Sulak River north of Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan.

The dead seals washed up at various places in the southern region of Dagestan, on the edge of Russia that stretches from the Caspian Sea into the Northern Caucasus, including its regional capital Makhachkala, the state fisheries agency told Russian media.


The cause of the deaths is unclear. A team from the Russian Academy of Sciences has arrived from Moscow to investigate.

The Caspian seal is the only mammal living in the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water. The seals have been endangered for years due to over-hunting in the sea, which is shared by Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkmenistan.

The states have extensive oil and gas reserves that affect the sea. Pollution and climate change have added to declining water levels, threatening many species in the area.

Since 2008, Caspian seals have been listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Experts say there are now about 70,000, down from more than one million in the early 20th century.

The Caspian seal was included in Russia’s Red Data Book of rare and endangered species this year.

The latest mass seal death is part of a recent string of ecological disasters causing marine wildlife deaths that have sparked environmental fears.

Two months ago, the sea surrounding the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia’s far east was coated in a yellowish foam and beaches littered with dead animals.

TRUMP A MASS MURDERER
Vaccine comes too late for the 300,000 US dead

ADAM GELLER and HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH
Mon, December 14, 2020, 

When Brittany Palomo was hired as a nurse in March, her parents tried to talk her out of it, fearful of the fast-spreading coronavirus. All the more reason, she told them, to start the career that had been her long-held dream.

The pandemic, though, is a nightmare -- one that has now claimed 300,000 lives in the U.S. and counting.

“Wake up, my little girl, wake up!” Palomo's mother, Maria Palomo Salinas, screamed, her grief echoing through a Harlingen, Texas, hospital, when her daughter died of COVID-19 complications around 2 a.m. on a Saturday in late November.

Palomo was 27 and, as a health care worker, was probably weeks away from getting the new vaccine that could have protected her from the virus. Instead, she became yet another victim of the relentless outbreak whose U.S. toll is accelerating as it eclipses another round-number mark.

“The numbers are staggering -- the most impactful respiratory pandemic that we have experienced in over 102 years, since the iconic 1918 Spanish flu,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, said days before the U.S. reached the milestone.

The U.S. crossed the 300,000 threshold on the same it day it launched the biggest vaccination campaign in American history, with health care workers rolling up their sleeves for COVID-19 shots Monday.

The death toll was reported by Johns Hopkins University from data supplied by health authorities across the U.S. The real number of lives lost is believed to be much higher, in part because of deaths that were not accurately recorded as coronavirus-related during the early stages of the crisis.

It took four months for the virus to claim its first 100,000 American lives. But with cold weather driving people inside, where the virus spreads more easily, months of reluctance in many states to require masks, and an increase in gatherings over the holidays, some public health experts project 100,000 more could die before the end of January.

“It can certainly feel like you’re standing on the beach and sandbagging a tsunami,” said Dr. Leon Kelly, who attends to both the dead and the living as coroner for El Paso County, Colorado, and deputy medical director of its public health department.

Already, the number of dead in the U.S. rivals the population of St. Louis or Pittsburgh. The toll is equivalent to repeating a tragedy on the scale of Hurricane Katrina every day for 5 1/2 months.

“To me it represents an extraordinary failure in our response,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins, contrasting U.S. officials’ scattershot response with the massive mobilization after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“To think, now we can just absorb in our country 3,000 deaths a day as though it were just business as usual. It just represents a moral failing.”

The U.S. accounts for nearly 1 out of 5 confirmed virus deaths worldwide, far more than any other country despite its wealth and medical resources.

While the pandemic’s toll continues to soar, much has changed since the U.S. surpassed 200,000 deaths in late September.

Scientists’ furious pursuit of a vaccine is finally delivering results, beginning with the rollout of Pfizer's formula. If a second vaccine is authorized soon, as expected, 20 million people could be vaccinated by month’s end.

At the same time, the country is poised for a major shift after an election that was, in large part, a referendum on the Trump administration’s handling of the virus. President-elect Joe Biden has made clear his first priority upon taking office next month will be a comprehensive overhaul of efforts to defeat the infection.

Still, experts said, it could take well into the new year for the first wave of vaccines and other precautions to bring cases and deaths under control. Experts are warning the country must steel itself for a deadly winter.

“We are heading into probably the worst period possible because of all the things we had in the spring, which is fatigue, political resistance, maybe the loss of all the good will we had about people doing their part,” Nuzzo said.

More than 109,000 people with the virus are now in U.S. hospitals, according to the COVID Tracking Project, far eclipsing the 60,000 who filled wards during the previous peaks in April and July.

On a single day last week, the U.S. recorded more than 3,300 COVID-19 deaths, easily exceeding the heights reached in April, when the New York City area was the epicenter.

Doctors now have far more experience in treating patients, and a few drugs have been approved to speed recovery. But the toll now is far more widespread, reaching into rural areas and small and medium-size communities that don't have big-city resources.

In Waterloo, Iowa, Dr. Stacey Marlow called the wife of an 89-year-old COVID-19 patient in his final hours, not realizing until well into the conversation that the couple’s son had also died of the virus in her hospital just two days earlier.

“We see these horror stories every day so they start to run together,” said Marlow, who works in the emergency room at UnityPoint Allen Hospital.

In Los Angeles, the county’s health director, Barbara Ferrer, fought tears during a televised briefing last week as she reported a steep rise in local deaths, up to an average of 43 each day, compared with roughly a dozen in mid-November.

“Over 8,000 people who were beloved members of their families are not coming back,” Ferrer said.

In Columbia, South Carolina, the family of a third-grade teacher, Staci Blakely, asked the school district to announce her death in hopes of persuading the public to take the virus seriously.

“One of the ways we can celebrate her life is being sure that we continue to take care of each other,” schools Superintendent Greg Little said.

And then there are the families and colleagues of health care workers who are still being lost to COVID-19, even as hope draws within view.

For weeks now, Dr. James Williams has been hearing the voice of his friend Dr. Juan Fitz, an emergency room physician in Lubbock, Texas, who was hospitalized for the virus this fall after months of triaging COVID-19 patients.

“I am airborne. I am cavalry,” the 67-year-old Fitz said over the summer, describing his role in taking on the pandemic. “I go into the thick of it and, challenged by the situation, find ways to improve and sort things out.”

He died on Nov. 3.

“I’m sorry, it still gets me,” a distraught Williams said Friday, hours before the first vaccine won approval. Choking back tears, he recalled his last text message to Fitz, one the soldier-in-scrubs never answered.

Please know, he wrote, “you have an Army of friends and colleagues pulling for you.”

___

Associated Press writers Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, and Christopher Weber in Los Angeles contributed to this story.