The two-day Biogen conference in late February at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf hotel is responsible for infecting as many as 330,000 people with the novel coronavirus worldwide, according to a new study published in the journal Science. 

Previously, in another study, the super-spreading event had been blamed for leading to roughly twenty thousand virus cases.

In concluding the findings, the researchers tracked the unique genetic signatures of the coronavirus that could be traced to the downtown Boston event. The team was eventually able to settle on the fact that about one hundred people contracted the virus initially at the conference.

Then through Nov. 1, the genetic marker of that particular strain was discovered in fifty-one thousand cases in and around Boston. The virus also spread to other locations in the United States, as many as twenty-nine states, and eventually made its way to distant countries like Slovakia, Sweden, and Australia, according to the study.

“Because SARS-CoV-2 viruses circulating at the conference happened to be marked by distinct genomic signatures, we were able to track its downstream effects far beyond the super-spreading event itself, tracing the descendants of the virus as they made a large contribution to the local outbreak in the Boston area and as they spread throughout the U.S. and the world, likely causing hundreds of thousands of cases,” the study’s authors wrote.

The researchers noted that since this particular event occurred early in the pandemic—before lockdowns, mask mandates, and social-distancing measures—the contagion had an easier avenue to spread quickly and widely.

The research estimates that the conference alone is responsible for about 1.6 percent of all cases in the United States, which has witnessed more than sixteen million infections and about three hundred thousand related deaths since the start of the pandemic ten months ago, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.

“If there is a public health message here, it is that the conditions that enable these types of massive super-spreading events to occur are still with us,” the study’s lead author Dr. Jacob Lemieux, an infectious disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, told the Boston Globe.

“They’re still possible if we let our guard down. They’re still possible if infected but otherwise healthy people mingle and travel without restriction.” 

More than fifty researchers were credited in the study.

A spokeswoman for Biogen issued a statement saying that the ongoing pandemic “had a very direct and personal impact on the Biogen community—as it has on many communities across the country and world.” 

The statement continued: “As a company rooted in science, we understand the value of the data that came from the first wave of the pandemic in the Boston area and we hope that information gleaned from these data will help continue to drive a better understanding of the transmission of this virus and efforts to address it.”

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Minneapolis-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.  

Image: Reuters