Are all of these handmade cloth masks people are making useful?

[BamaRefugee]

29. They're as useful as "duck and cover" was back in the 60s.

Not going into a long rant about it, but I'll just say that Americans making masks out of coffee filters shows the complete failure of our system.
I saw video yesterday from Madrid, Spain, where policemen had boxes full of masks and were handing one out to EVERY SINGLE PERSON who walked by..real masks, not old t-shirts and hair ties. Here? All you'll see is policemen dragging people off of buses and out of stores for not wearing a mask, which is basically unobtainable.
I saw video where other police were basically beating up some of the absolute poorest people in the world, street people in Johannesburg, South Africa, and all of the homeless people had on REAL MASKS.

If you actually read the entire CDC instructions on making masks from t-shirts,(a very popular post here on DU) which tested out at 50% effectiveness, you'll find that you actually have to have a BRAND NEW shirt of a certain brand, AND you have to cut 4 layers of the material out and overlay each of them with the grain of the fabric going a diferent direction in each layer. And you have to sterilize the t-shirt first. Then sew the rest of it together.(as if we all have a sewing machine handy). Far more complicated than wrapping a bandana across your face.

After doing that, if you read on, it says that these masks are not viable in the workplace! And it further says that this pattern was developed to be used in Third World countries, NOT in the richest nation on Earth. And, it says people with any kind of respiratory difficulty should not wear these masks. And the part no one seems to read, ONLY ONE of the t-shirts they made was 50% effective, with a fit factor of 67 (you have to have a fit factor of 100 to be effective)while the others only achieved fit factors of 13 and 17!. And on and on, with a special warning about masks that have been made by "naive users" which I think would be most of us.

My main point really is: After Pearl Harbor we were building freaking HUGE battleships, tanks, airplanes *within months*, but now after months we cannot manufacture MASKS??????? EPIC FAIL.

Koch Industries make BILLIONS of dollars making all kinds of paper products, I DARE the so-called president to invoke his wartime powers and tell them to make some fucking masks. But I won't hold my t-shirt filtered breath waiting for it to happen.