The subsequent findings are that cloth-type masks are less effective (but not wholly ineffective) compared to clinical/surgical masks at limiting the aerosolized viral shedding from those already infected. So if a cloth mask was all you had, the advice became "please wear it".
Turns out, many people assume advice is only relevant when given for their own direct & immediate personal benefit, so they hear what they want to hear, and even the idea of giving a shit about externalities is sheer anathema. That gets boiled down further for idiot-grade TV and bad-faith social media troll engagement and we wind up with reductive and snarky soundbites, like the remark above, that help nobody at all.
Back on topic, the choice of so-called "experts" in the Guardian's coverage of the AWS matter seems to be a classic matchup of journalistic expediency with self-promoting interests to pad an article that otherwise has little to say beyond paraphrasing Amazon's operational updates.