Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been known since 2020. From the beginning, the public health message could have been "protect yourself using a N-95 mask", but for some reason they went with "protect others using a cloth/surgical mask". The only reasonable explanation I can find for this is that N-95 masks were in short supply at the time and they had to be saved for medical professionals. We needed a distraction to prevent the general publ…
I thought that "airborne" meant "could survive in water aerosols for long enough to get breathed in" not "sprouted little virus wings and flew through any hole it could fit through" And I assumed water droplets were in fact several orders of magnitude larger than the virus, but would still be caught my masks. Otherwise what's the point for any virus?
The cloth mask still stops the vast majority of such drops, cutting risk significantly compared to no mask.