NEW YORK – A meeting at a hotel in Boston last February may have ignited the spread of the pandemic virus to some 19,000 people in the area, a new study suggests.Health authorities had previously linked the meeting to more than 90 cases among people at the meeting and their contacts.
But researchers found that a specific mutation in the virus from people associated with the meeting also showed up in hundreds of other cases, which allowed them to estimate the broader extent of the spread.It's “a pretty unsophisticated, back-of-the envelope calculation that we think gives us a sense of the scale,” Bronwyn MacInnis of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, senior author of the paper, said Tuesday.The research paper has been posted online but.