Those who get COVID and end up hospitalized tend to show up as deaths 21 days later. The time reflects fighting the virus and the SIDE EFFECTS of it. That 21-day lag time is noted on many of the charts showing the growth of COVID this winter, though it doesn't mean that you suffer for 21 days before dying.

Here in the US people are double-masking now, going to the high-end N95 masks, and figuring out how to reuse them (there are several recommended ways to disinfect/sterilize those masks.) Hospitals were running them through autoclaves in 2020, now individuals are figuring out how to do something similar to save the expense of the masks.

Types of Masks and Respirators (from CDC)

The word is (it was well known from early on) that the flimsy cloth masks don't work well and with Omicron they shouldn't be used now. Many of the masks I still see in public are commercially produced lightweight ineffective masks. The earliest ones I made had a slit for putting in a paper filter, I stopped making those fairly soon and shifted to the heavy filtering of the three-layer flannel (inside) 3-D masks. Now those need to go over another surgical or KN95-level mask.