Last week Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine lifted crowd size limitations on outdoor public gatherings, but issued “simplified” guidelines on how Ohioans should continue to protect themselves from the COVID pandemic.

He suggested that people attending weddings, graduations, ballgames and festivals should, to quote the AP news article, “stay separated in groups of 10 or fewer, rather than merging into one huge crowd.” Pressed on how this could be accomplished, DeWine said, “People should just use common sense.”

Well, we here in Gas Valley, W.Va., are chock-full of common sense, and glad to share it with our friends in Ohio. My mother Ol’ Food ladled common sense into me from the time I sat on her knee, repeating the old-time sayings she was brought up with in Lincoln County.

People there may have lived so far up a holler that they had to pump the sunlight in, as Ol’ Food said, but they lived good lives by following the distilled wisdom of the old saws handed down through generations.

Your Honor, I fear you have listened overmuch to those who claim expertise and spout arbitrary numbers to justify the rules they propound. These are the kind of people my grandfather Millard Fillmore Adkins called “educated fools,” those who haven’t got the good sense God gave a goose.

Nevertheless, if you are set on this policy, I can pass along some suggestions from our side of the Ohio River. (Which we own, by the way.)

YOU COULD have people count off to from one to 10 as they come through the turnstiles of a fair or festival. All the twos would form a group, all the threes another, and so on. That’s how my gym class teacher at Chester Junior High School made up teams.

It might be better to look for similarities as people arrive at a fair or festival. Find the common “feather” that makes birds flock together.

When people buy tickets to the Canfield Fair they could be asked what they love most about county fairs. Riding the Tilt-a-Whirl? Eating corndogs and fried butter? The demolition derby? Blue-ribbon pickles and pies? Don’t cut them loose until each group has five to 10 people, and give out colored armbands to help them stay together.

Clothing might be another way to sort people out; for example, women wearing blue jeans full of raggedy holes. Ol’ Food said that poor people have poor ways, and you would think these ladies were so poor they don’t have a pot to pee in, but I am told the pants are already worn out when bought brand-new. Don’t worry about the husbands and boyfriends. They’ll tag along in whatever group you tell them; men who know enough not to say anything to women about their raggedy blue jeans will do what they’re told.

POLITICS MIGHT SEEM an obvious way to group people, but I don’t think I’d try forming Trump and Biden groups at, say, a wedding. There’s enough animosity there already; they need more like they need a hole in the head.

The bride’s people likely regard the groom as a man not worth the powder to blow him up, while the groom’s relatives wonder why he decided to buy the cow when he was getting the milk for free.

Because blood is thicker than water, the two families will socially distance themselves without government help, with sub-groups forming naturally by age. When told to clump together for pictures they will grit their teeth, knowing they would be happy as pigs in slop to never have to see the in-laws again.

You should just leave weddings alone. Churches, too. When you’ve sat in the same pew for 30 years, you’d quit the church sooner than be re-grouped.

Concerts and ballgames, which people attend with a single common interest, will be easy to separate into small groups. Simply sell tickets at random, like they do now, but in 10-seat blocks, with a two-seat social distance gap on all sides.

At THE Ohio State University Football Stadium (see there, I said it right) capacity is 100,000, so you can sell 5,000 groups of 10 tickets, factoring in a 50 percent reduction for the empty seats.

They’re all OSU fans, so they should be happy as clams however you group them. But suppose one or two in a group stick out like a sore thumb. Nine are happily telling Michigan jokes and reminiscing about Woody Hayes, when the 10thmentions that Woody got fired for punching a player. Understandably the others are fit to be tied. To maintain harmony, groups would be allowed to kick out misfits, who then must roam the stadium, begging other groups to take them in. Watching the exiles run around like chickens with their heads cut off would add entertainment value to pre-game festivities. A guy in an Art Schlichter jersey might wander the stadium for the whole game like Job’s turkey, who, as you may recall, felt so poorly he had to lean against the fence to gobble.

Gov. DeWine, people will straighten up and fly right if you add some West Virginia common sense to your new guidelines. If you don’t, they’ll be about as useful as tits on a boar hog.