[jvanderbot]

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?

[jacobolus]

The water droplets are several orders of magnitude larger than the virus, but still small enough for some of them to fit through the gaps in a cloth mask (but almost none make it past an N95 mask).

The cloth mask still stops the vast majority of such drops, cutting risk significantly compared to no mask.