@realcaseyrollins Sup Casey, hope your doing well.
The cloth face masks are honestly mostly to prevent people from spitting/coofing on each other.
You get infected by getting a certain amount of the virus inside your body. There's a threshold amount that the virus has to reach before it really starts affecting you. A single virus cell isn't enough to typically infect someone. This is why people are advicating to go outside more, because the ambient wind blows away the COVID virus before it reaches a meaningful threshold.
COVID can get in your body through any mucous membrane. That's stuff like around your eyes, nose and mouth (among other things).
To transfer from one person to another, the virus typically needs to be transferred by something. Typically this is liquid droplets created by coughing or speaking.
The main purpose of a cloth face mask is to catch these liquid droplets in them and prevent them from flying onto surfaces or other peoples faces, etc.
N-95 masks are really cool and actually go a step above being a physical barrier, they actually use electrostatic properties to trap virus molecules in the mask. (The N-95 means it captures 95% of particles)
This is really good for environments were you know you're going to be exposed to sick people, like a hospital. But they have to be worn with other protective gear like face shields or goggles and gloves, since having someone cough in your eyes can infect you as easily as breathing in someones cough. You also can't really reuse or wash the N-95 masks because it makes them lose their electrostatic properties.
So yeah, N-95 masks are quite a bit better than plain face coverings and are meant to protect their wearer, but they have to be worn absolutely correctly.
(I'm not a doctor) Fun N-95 video:
https://youtu.be/eAdanPfQdCA
As far as materials are concerned, this was posted today. https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-best-mask-or-diy-face-covering-for-covid-19/
@blight