--- title: "Scientists: A Single Event Caused 40% of COVID Cases in Boston" description: "This is bad: scientists say that a staggering 40 percent of coronavirus cases in Boston can be traced to a single biotech conference." date: "2020-08-26" modified: "2020-08-26" authors: - name: "Jon Christian" job_title: "Executive Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jonc" url: "https://futurism.com/neoscope/scientists-single-event-40-percent-covid-boston" categories: - "Gene Editing" - "Genetics" - "Health & Medicine" tags: - "coronavirus" - "covid" - "covid-19" - "health" --- # Scientists: A Single Event Caused 40% of COVID Cases in Boston ![This is bad: scientists say that a staggering 40 percent of coronavirus cases in Boston can be traced to a single biotech conference.]() *\Image: Skitterians via Pixabay\* In a grim example of how a single gathering can turn into a superspreading event for COVID-19, scientists say that a staggering 40 percent of coronavirus cases in Boston can be traced to a single biotech conference. "It’s a cautionary tale," said Bronwyn MacInnis, a viral genomicist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the lead author of the new research, in [an interview with *WBUR*](), "as we go forward and begin to open our communities, our workplaces and schools." The biotech conference was organized by pharmaceutical company Biogen, in Cambridge [back in early March](), during the early days of the pandemic's spread in the United States. Officials soon realized that the gathering had been filled with people who were unknowingly carrying the virus — and who then returned home to at least six states and several foreign countries. State officials counted at least 99 infections resulting from the event [in Massachusetts alone](). The news led MacInnis to wonder, *WBUR* reported, whether it would be possible to compare the strain of the virus that had spread at the Biogen event to genetic information about other strains that her colleagues had assembled from samples collected worldwide. What she found was alarming, according to a [preprint study]() about the work. She and her collaborators found that as of early July, as many as 40 percent of COVID cases in Boston could be traced to the single Biogen event. "It’s fair to say it’s striking. \[The conference\] certainly has had an impact on the trajectory of the pandemic domestically and abroad," MacInnis told *WBUR*. "It’s a great example of how connected we all are, and how viruses are agnostic to how they move and who they may infect. The activities that happen in one corner of a society can have far-reaching effects on others." Worse, MacInnis's team found, the disease quickly spread from researchers and executives at the Biogen event to the city's sizeable homeless population. "It took just a few weeks before this virus essentially made its way from this international business conference into this very vulnerable population," said Dr. Jessie Gaeta, the chief medical officer of an organization that works with homeless people in Boston who worked on the study, in an interview with *WBUR*. Ironically, the *New York Times* [reported in an earlier story](), Biogen executive Michel Vounatsos was asked onstage at the conference whether he expected that COVID could disrupt the company's supply chains — concerns that he dismissed. "So far, so good," he said, according to the paper. The takeaway of the research isn't entirely new — if you find yourself tempted to attend a crowded gathering, you're putting people in danger who are many degrees of separation away from you — but it is an alarming example of the worst-case outcome of crowded events in the era of COVID. ## Author I'm responsible for editing, assigning, and scouting at Futurism, as well as occasionally writing for the site. That work involves keeping an eye on a wide range of narratives and issues, but over the past few years I've become increasingly interested in how AI is shaping the future of media, the web, and information itself. My day-to-day often involves collaborating on reporting and commentary projects bylined by my colleagues, but I try to find time to do my own reporting as well; stories I've broken for Futurism have been cited by publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Wired, Ars Technica, New York Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, Bloomberg, and more. I grew up in Southern Vermont and attended Vanderbilt University. Prior to Futurism, I contributed to outlets including the Boston Globe, Vice, Wired, Slate, the Atlantic, the Outline, Ars Technica and more, and did stints in farming and food service. I currently live in Brooklyn, New York, and in my free time I enjoy pinball, word games, cycling, running, and music production. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()