Amy Mitchell’s Long Covid
by David Archibald
25 October 2026
Covid is still with us, Perth’s wastewater analysis tells us so.
Perth wastewater viral load 2023 – 2026, cases per 100,000 population
And this is the composition by variant:
The dominant variant at the moment is NB.1.8.X
With every covid infection, you have a chance of developing long covid. This happens when the virus finds a home in immunoprotected tissue such as bone marrow or the gut-associated lymphoid tissue. From that hideout, where the immune system can’t hunt it down, the virus depletes the immune cells, particularly CD8. HIV acts similarly, but attacks the other main immune cell type, CD4. If you think you have long covid, you can quantify your viral load by having a blood test for antibodies to the nucleocapsid protein and spike protein of the virus. In Australia, Clinipath offers the test (needs a prescription) and this is what a result looks like:
In this case, antibodies to the nucleocapsid protein weren’t detected while spike protein antibodies gave a result of 92. A result above 50 is considered to be positive. People with long covid can have results in the range of 20,000 to 30,000, and are quite sick. Their lives are ruined. Some of these go to Japan for a blood treatment process known as double filtration plasmapheresis (FDPP), which costs $250,000 with the effect lasting six months.
What to do? The treatment for long covid will be the same approach as for HIV — a combination of molecules inhibiting two or three binding sites to stop viral replication
Amy Mitchell’s effort to treat herself is instructive. Her chronology starts in 2018:
Amy started with a suppressed immune system, due to treatment for another condition. Her CD4 and CD8 levels should have been twice what they were at the time. Her covid infection was on 8th March, 2020, with an immediate hit to her CD4 and CD8 levels. She tried various things, including the HIV drugs Truvada and Stribild, without effect. There was a response to Tollovid in mid-2024 but that ended when it became unavailable. Tollovid dosing started again in late 2025 with good effect. That is shown in this graph of her CD4 and CD8 levels over the last eight years:
So what is Tollovid? In 2021, a Chinese paper came out with a result for the molecule shikonin of an IC50 of 1.6 micromolar against covid. Its mode of action is binding to the Mpro molecule of covid. With a molecular weight of 288.3 grams per mole, that is an efficacy of 0.5 ng/ml, which is quite good. The downsides are low oral bioavailability and a half life in the body of possibly five hours or so. Shikonin is produced by a plant known as gromwell, Lithospermum erythrorhizon. Gromwell extract is produced in China. So, after reading the paper, some Americans started a company called Tollo Health. They import gromwell root extract, put it into capsules, and sell it as Tollovid. The capsules are quite mingy though, at 300 mg each, explaining why Amy is taking three capsules per dose point. She was on six hourly dosing because of the short half-life, for a total of 12 capsules per day, and is now down to nine capsules per day.
The significance of Amy’s experience is that it is possible to bring covid under control with molecules from plant extracts. Synergy, and thus increased efficacy, would come from binding to more molecules on the covid virion. The ones to bind to in order to inhibit replication are Mpro, PLpro and RdRp:
David Archibald is the author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia