Biogen spreading corvid-19 in Boston
Biogen? What's going on? https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/03/09/biogens-boston-conference-continues-to-be-leading-source-of-coronavirus-cases/ Anyone from Biogen on Blind?
Yep. Current Biogen employee here. Honestly I think it's just terrible luck or timing. It happened at a global executive leadership meeting, and unfortunately the disease spreads quickly. Global leaders got together, met/said hello/shook hands/etc, then did what they do -- go back and meet with the people in their office to espouse whatever they talked about. The meeting was 2 weeks ago, right at the point US was starting to think about maybe taking it seriously. If the meeting was last week, it would probably have been cancelled.
Can you please give a referral in Biogen
Its literally in the name
wtf!!
70 cases from that conference!! Did someone go there sick?? How long ago was the meeting?
Sad but true!! Out of 95 confirmed cases in MA, 77 are tied to Biogen conference. In NC, out of 7 confirmed cases, 5 are tied to the conference. All office based employees in Cambridge, RTP and Baar, Switzerland are asked to WFH till further notice. This story from Boston Globe covers it all https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/11/nation/how-biogen-leadership-conference-boston-spread-coronavirus/
Is there any understanding of how it infected the meeting? Did someone go to the meeting super sick? Or was this a case of asymptomatic transmission that is still a controversy?
To be fair the only reason such a large proportion of cases are from biogen is because it was easy to track contact between employees, and they’re only testing people they expect to have positive test results until very recently. If they tested everyone in Boston right now, Biogen probably wouldn’t even be newsworthy because it would just be a drop in the ocean.
I laugh when I see people ask if some went to the conference sick. The incubation period is up to two weeks. So you can have the virus and be spreading it and not feel sick at all. So yes, someone obviously went to the conference who was infected.
I read that asymptomatic transmission is debatable and extremely limited at the best.
Wrong
Biogen sucks
I’m a former Biogen employee. I left at the end of last year but I’m still friends with people there. The incident happened at meeting, not at Biogen itself. All of the cases I’ve heard about stemmed from people at the meeting, and it’s not going around between Biogen employees. Biogen also has a pretty good WfH policy and they’ve requested that basically everyone work from home for the next two weeks.