Boston Biotech Conference Led To 245,000 COVID-19 Cases Across US
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A biotech conference in Boston last February that's already been flagged as a Covid-19 superspreading event led to at least 245,000 other cases across the US and Europe, a new genetic fingerprinting study shows. One single case seems to have been responsible for many of the other eventual cases, the team at the Broad Institute in Massachusetts reported. Their study finds two particular genetic fingerprints of viruses associated with the conference and then tracks those lineages across the US. One "was exported from Boston to at least 18 US states as well as to other countries, including Australia, Sweden, and Slovakia," the team, led by Bronwyn MacInnis, director of pathogen genomic surveillance at the Broad Institute, wrote in the journal Science. One was especially bad. A virus carrying one mutation -- a small genetic change they've flagged as C2416T -- was apparently carried to the conference by a single person, and ended up infecting 245,000 people. A subset of the viral strain with a mutation known as G26233T ended up in 88,000 of these cases. "A single introduction had an outsize effect on subsequent transmission because it was amplified by superspreading in a highly mobile population very early in the outbreak, before many public health precautions were put in place," the team wrote. "While Massachusetts accounted for most early spread related to the conference, Florida accounted for the greatest proportion of cases overall," they added.
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