@bi4smooth There are lots of issues swimming around here, perhaps foremost among them that CNN, like Fox News, is an entertainment channel whose goal is to draw audience that supports higher advertising revenue. The technology behind masks is too complicated for sound-bite television to convey: Even if it did so, audiences with microscopic attention spans would get confused and switch channels...the ultimate fail of at TV programme.
It has been indeed been demonstrated that, under laboratory conditions, a patch of N95 or other medical-grade filter material, will do a better job of filtering out nasties than a a couple of layers of cloth. Those demonstrations, though are only relevant if all exhalation goes through the material--think of tightly clamping a patch of that material around the end of a pipe--or the highly unlikely situation that a person wearing a mask of such material has it so tightly fitted to their face that there is no leakage path around the edges. Nobody's mask-wearing ever satisfies that condition. People often complain about their glasses fogging up whilst wearing a mask--that's due to water vapour-laden exhalation leaking from the top of their mask.
In real life, a primary benefit of a mask, whether cloth or medical grade, is to decelerate and diffuse exhaled breath. This will significantly reduce the spread of that breath to other people, especially if they are socially distanced by two metres. An N95 mask will be better than cloth, but only marginally so. A poorly-fitting but properly-worn cloth mask is still infinitely superior to no mask at all.
Two additional points in favour of an N95 mask:
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The shape of an N95 mask is such that it's much less likely to slip down below the nose (and having an uncovered nose is the same as not wearing a mask at all). For careless people who let their cloth or light blue surgical masks slip down below their nose, an N95 mask would be of great benefit.
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My discussion above addressed exhalation. Breathing, of course, also involves inhalation. An N95 mask is shaped in such a way that it will be pulled closer to the face during inhalation, thus drawing more air through the mask material and less from around the edges. A cheap cloth mask, especially a shapeless rectangle, will not do this, and much of the inhaled air will come from the loose sides of the mask rather than through the cloth--effectively eliminating the benefit of a mask
So, yes, an N95 mask is better than a cloth one...but not by much for most people. A well-fitting cloth mask is still very beneficial, and infinitely superior to wearing nothing at all (or wearing a mask incorrectly).
And now, a final slam at CNN: When I pulled up the link in the original post, I saw the following (snipped from the full page):
Note that while the headline--and article--essentially say "Wear a medical mask, not a cloth one," the image right below is a link to a video of Sanjay Gupta showing us how to make a shapeless cloth mask out of a bandana--something completely antithetical to the story content. It seems that the web designer who built the page didn't bother to read the story. We are not surprised.
