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In February of this year, more than 100 leaders of the drug company Biogen met in Boston. Among them was at least one person infected with COVID-19.
While the Massachusetts Department of Public Health initially identified 97 cases linked to the conference through contact tracing, a new study detailing the genomes of viruses collected from the Greater Boston area indicates that the gathering may have led to more than 20,000 cases across four counties.
The authors of the study arrived at the new count using what Bronwyn MacInnis, an infectious disease researcher at the Broad Institute and the senior author of the paper, describes to the Associated Press as “a pretty unsophisticated, back-of-the envelope calculation.” The total does not appear in the paper, posted August 25 on the preprint server medRxiv, but her coauthor Jacob Lemieux, an infectious disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, tells the ...
