My mom has made cloth masks for the whole family. My wife is wearing them while she works as a PT at their outpatient clinic. I wore one to the store the other day.
We bought a couple of cloth masks, and I wore mine when I had to go to the store on Friday. I felt like a complete and total doofus.
Err... Even more of a complete and total doofus than normal, I should say...
Really the sole purpose of a mask of this ilk is to prevent YOU from infecting someone else. The protection it affords YOU personally is minimal, to zero.
I don't know that I buy that. Any barrier is better than no barrier. It makes you much less likely to inhale airborne droplets containing the virus--and even if some of the virus gets through a cloth mask, it will reduce the viral load and perhaps give your body a smaller dose for your immune system to attack.
What I would say is that I suspect a lot of people with the mask/gloves thing get a false sense of safety and then may be more reckless. In high school, I was a "sandwich artist" at Subway and one of the reasons that they didn't wear gloves is that it's much more important to regularly wash your hands (and not touch your face) than to wear gloves, because the virus doesn't seep through the skin on your hands. If you're wearing gloves and forget not to touch your face with the glove, you're just as screwed as if you did it with your bare finger. Gloves and masks aren't magic.
My protocol if I leave the house for an errand is to take sanitary wipes with me in the car. When I get to my location, I'll put on my mask. When I get out of the store and load the car, the first thing I do when I get into the car (before touching the steering wheel, before starting the ignition, etc) is to use the sanitary wipe to wash my hands, remove the mask, wipe down my hands AGAIN, and then I'm good to go. The idea is to not allow myself to be complacent about potentially touching my face with infected hands.
