Shrews

The henipavirus can cause respiratory symptoms and is related to Nipah and Hendra viruses, but cannot spread easily in people.

This suggested that shrews are a reservoir for the virus, passing LayV between themselves “and somehow infecting people here and there by chance”, says Gurley. Still, she notes that she didn’t see anything in the data to “cause alarm from a pandemic-threat perspective”. The LayV genome shows that the virus is most closely related to Mojiang henipavirus, which was first isolated in rats in an abandoned mine in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan in 2012. Most patients said in a questionnaire that they had been exposed to an animal within a month of their symptoms appearing. Researchers say LayV has infected only 35 people since 2018, and none of the cases seems to be linked. The virus was named after a town called Langya, in Shandong, where she was from, says co-author Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke–National University of Singapore Medical School in Singapore.