Day 207: Our Poor Decisions

The Boston Globe reports, again, on that little incident in the spring where Biogen, a Boston-based biotech company chock full of people who Should Know Better™, managed to spread coronavirus across the nation and the globe with their ill-timed leadership conference:

Now, a sweeping study of nearly 800 coronavirus genomes, conducted by no less than 54 researchers at the Broad Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and several other institutions in the state, has found that viruses carrying the conference’s characteristic mutation infected hundreds of people in the Boston area, as well as victims from Alaska to Senegal to Luxembourg. As of mid-July, the variant had been found in about one-third of the cases sequenced in Massachusetts and 3 percent of all genomes studied thus far in the United States.

Biogen's special contribution is only part of the genetic data covered by the preprint at medRxiv. They document 80 "likely introductions" of COVID-19 to Massachusetts from four continents, and they also document an unusual outbreak at an unnamed skilled nursing facility in the area. (They didn't name Biogen, either, but everybody knows.)

Massachusetts' cases are up a third of a percentage point today.