It what might be a surprisingly good thing, Covid-19 might linger in your gut cells long after infection, which stimulates your immune system to improve the antibodies against Covid-19.
Maybe residual viral particles are hiding out somewhere, the team surmised. They decided to go fishing in the gut. (Like the lungs, people's intestines are carpeted with the kind of cells SARS-CoV-2 can invade, Nussenzweig explains.) They teamed up with physicians from Mount Sinai Hospital and examined biopsies from seven of 14 patients who had recovered from COVID-19. In the intestinal tissue, the researchers found viral traces, including SARS-CoV-2's telltale crown of spikes. "The images are quite striking," Gaebler says.
It's possible that antibodies mutate in response to the residual viral antigen tucked away in people's bowels, Nussenzweig says, though there may be other caches of coronavirus in the body.
