Various news outlets are reporting a paper (2nd link below; not yet peer reviewed) that found that the coronavirus can persist throughout the body for many months.
Here's the abstract from the paper:
>>>COVID-19 is known to cause multi-organ dysfunction in acute infection, with
prolonged symptoms experienced by some patients, termed Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-
CoV-2 (PASC). However, the burden of infection outside the respiratory tract and time
to viral clearance is not well characterized, particularly in the brain. We performed
complete autopsies on 44 patients with COVID-19 to map and quantify SARS-CoV-2
distribution, replication, and cell-type specificity across the human body, including brain,
from acute infection through over seven months following symptom onset. We show that
SARS-CoV-2 is widely distributed, even among patients who died with asymptomatic to
mild COVID-19, and that virus replication is present in multiple pulmonary and
extrapulmonary tissues early in infection. Further, we detected persistent SARS-CoV-2
RNA in multiple anatomic sites, including regions throughout the brain, for up to 230 days
following symptom onset. Despite extensive distribution of SARS-CoV-2 in the body, we
observed a paucity of inflammation or direct viral cytopathology outside of the lungs. Our
data prove that SARS-CoV-2 causes systemic infection and can persist in the body for
months.<<<