BOSTON – New genetic knowledge is helping to tell how COVID-19 arrived in Massachusetts, exploded in a hotel’s convention center, arrived at a nursing home, hit a homeless shelter and helped spread the virus around the world.
Although some parts of the story have already been told and others remain elusive, genetic knowledge of many COVID-19 infections in the Boston domain in March and April fills some gaps.
The new studies follow several “widespread events” that can help officials determine which activities are safe and which are dangerous, said Dr. Jacob Lemieux, who helped lead the study, which was published online Tuesday and has not yet been peer-reviewed.
One of the massive occasions took place last February at a convention of the biotechnology company Biogen, which specializes in the remedy of neurological diseases.
Approximately two hundred other people attended the company’s control meeting. More than 90 infections have been tracked in Massachusetts and potentially up to 20,000 worldwide, Lemieux said.
Participants shod hands, exchanged jokes and sat together in the same room all day for two days, said Barry Bloom, a Harvard T.H. immunologist. Chan School of Public Health. “With unknown amounts of ventilation,” added William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the same school, from the study. Both took part in a phone call with the media on Tuesday.
“The fact that this can happen is anything we want to take into account in the way we decided to reopen society,” said Lemieux, a resident physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and postdoctoral at the Broad Institute, a genetics specialist. studies at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Big indoor events are not a good idea, while most of the population remains vulnerable to infection, he said.
“I don’t think the message is: “We want indefinite locks, everything has to be outdoors forever,” he said. In some cases, hazards can be reduced by using masks, social distance, testing, and increased ventilation. But examining the registration issues that can bring massive occasions and gives some advice on how to restrict the consequences of such occasions.
The virus that causes COVID-19 has arrived in Boston in more than 80 other ways.
One user brought it from Wuhan, China, last January, according to the data, but did not pass it on to anyone else. Some other inflamed people arrived from Europe in early March, but did not seem to convey it.
In early spring, dozens more took him from Europe. Others took him from New York, a four-hour journey south. In April, the maximum instances were transmitted locally than the imported ones, according to the investigation.
On Tuesday, 8961 more people in Massachusetts died from COVID-19 and 102,205 recovered, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Researchers sequenced and analyzed virus genes in 772 of cases as of August 1, adding all cases shown in early March and two other highly wide-spreading events.
By examining the small genetic adjustments that occur when the virus reproduces and is transmitted from one user to another, researchers can track their movement.
The origins of the infections that affected the Biogen convention are unclear, even after examining the genetics of 28 of the more than 90 related infections, Lemieux said. The document does not identify the convention, but the dates and number of infections related to it correspond to those of Biogen.
It is imaginable that the participants have brought it from Europe or elsewhere to the United States. Employees who were provided in the Boston domain may have brought it to Marriott Long Wharf, with its striking view of Boston Harbor.
On February 26, the start day of the convention, 53 CASES of COVID-19 were registered in the United States, and companies were just beginning to cancel face-to-face conventions.
Convention-related people appear to have the virus in Virginia, North Carolina and Texas, as well as in other countries besides Australia, Sweden and Slovakia.
Lemieux stated that it was to make an optimal account of the knowledge he and his colleagues reviewed. But, he said, “it’s transparent from many angles, whether it’s seeking Massachusetts knowledge, state-level knowledge for the United States, or global knowledge, that the scale of this occasion is measured in tens of thousands of cases.”
Biogen had the misfortune of being the convention where the super-broadcast took place, but this may have happened at any meeting, Lemieux said. At the time, other people simply didn’t know how contagious the virus was.
“There’s nothing special about this specific convention, the misfortune of obviously having at least one internal inflamed user in a set of cases that led to an extra transmission,” he said. “The convention was important, but COVID-19 came with or without it.”
In April, Biogen formed a consortium with the Massachusetts General and the Broad to unite their workers who hired COVID-19 to create a biobank of study samples.
“We would never have knowingly put others in danger,” Biogen spokeswoman Anna Robinson said in a statement. “When we learned that several of our colleagues were ill, we didn’t know the cause of COVID-19, but we promptly informed the government of public aptitude and took steps to restrict the spread.”
People living or working in nursing homes and long-term care services accounted for 22% of all COVID-19 cases as of August 1 and 64% of the 8433 COVID-19-related deaths reported in Massachusetts at that time.
A nursing facility examined citizens because he planned to relocate them to make room for COVID-19 patients discharged from a hospital. The administrators, Lemieux said, were surprised to be informed that 80 citizens and staff were already infected, 90% of whom were similar to a singles advent in early April.
It is not known how many other people have inflamed in a few weeks or less, he said, but “this will be a mass circulation event.”
In contrast, at a shelter administered by the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, the virus entered at least seven times, according to research, 4 of which led to groups of 20 or more infections each.
About some of these infections had the same genetic errors as the Biogen conference virus, revealing a link between Boston’s biotech industry and the region’s homeless population.
“The virus is spreading in communities from the most sensitive to the most socioeconomic in a way we don’t understand,” Harvard’s Hanage said.
Research emphasizes that the spread of occasions can have a profound effect on an epidemic. These occasions are somewhat different from typical transmission pathways, additional studies are needed to better perceive them, Hanage said.
People who are super spreaders can be fundamentally different. Or those cases may be just a matter of opportunity, where a contagious user discovers himself in a scenario where he can transmit the virus to others. In South Korea, a guy spread COVID-19 in five bars he visited in one night, causing a primary epidemic.
“I hope, I will have to say, that mass occasions will remain rare,” Hanage said, “because we’re not going to give the virus a chance to spread.”
Contact Karen Weintraub at [email protected]
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