Ideally the government would have owned up and said:

‘wups we were supposed to be stockpiling these for the last 10 years when this topic came up in a disaster planning scenario (it did), but we didn’t do that and now there is no way we will have enough for many years because industrial supply chains are never operated at <10% capacity without government subsidies(wups #2). Make cloth masks work in the mean time but they are 10x less effective than masks with built in static charged fibers, so the best you can do is socially distance and keep your activities out doors when you can.’

We see the reverberation today, with people still wearing cloth masks and governments not stockpiling for the next pandemic (would rather have one extra tank than available supply for every citizen).