If my sons were to sit on the banks of my local creek in Maryland and cast in a hooked worm, trying to catch a trout or a bass, it would be illegal, even though it has about a 0% chance of spreading the coronavirus. Fishing always requires distancing to avoid lines crossing, and on the average day my sons go fishing there, they see about zero other people.

I cleared a copse of bamboo from my backyard this week, and when I tried to drop it off at the county dump, I was told I wasn’t allowed to thanks to Maryland’s stay-at-home rules. I have much more bamboo than I can fit in all my bins/baskets/buckets, so I wanted to do a dump run today and use curbside pickup for the rest tomorrow. Not allowed.