Islamabad-Cloth masks are made of intertwined fibers. SARS-CoV-2 is really small, too small to be trapped by most fabrics that you’d find around your home. Fortunately, it often travels in droplets a lot bigger than that, and cloth masks could help with those. While some small drops might still get through a cloth mask will help lock the larger ones from breaching our mouths and leaving our mouths. At this point, there’s no really big controlled study that looks at cloth masks, but what smaller studies have shown for the most part is that cloth masks are better than wearing nothing, and what they’re really doing is stopping those larger droplets. If you’re planning to buy or make a cloth mask, the CDC is recommending two layers of 100% cotton fabric that’s tightly woven. Think bed sheets with a really high thread count. Antimicrobial pillow cases actually blocked around 68% of the virus, but the vacuum cleaner bags did even better and blocked around 85% or more. A recent study, which we should mention, has not undergone any sort of rigorous peer review, looked at people’s homemade masks. They found that two layers of high quality heavyweight quilters cotton with a thread count of 180 or more did the best. That stopped about 79% of the particles from going through. And those particles were a little bit bigger than the SARS-CoV-2, but probably about the size of the droplets that it might travel in. And double layered masks did better than single layered masks.