COVID-19 is mainly known as a respiratory ailment, but a new study suggests the coronavirus can infect your intestinal tract for weeks and months after you've cleared the bug from your lungs.

In the study about 1 out of 7 COVID patients continued to shed the virus' genetic remnants in their feces at least four months after their initial diagnosis, long after they've stopped shedding the virus from their respiratory tract, researchers found.

This could explain why some COVID patients develop GI symptoms like abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, said senior researcher Dr. Ami Bhatt, an associate professor of medicine and genetics at Stanford University.

"We found that people who had cleared their respiratory infection—meaning they were no longer testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 in their respiratory tract—were continuing to shed SARS-CoV-2 RNA in their feces," Bhatt said. "And those people in particular had a high incidence of GI symptoms."

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