The COVID-19 outbreak has posed significant threats to international health and the economy In the absence of treatment for this virus, public health officials asked the public to practice social distancing to reduce the number of physical contacts However, quantifying social distancing is a challenging task and current methods are based on human movements We propose a time and cost-effective approach to measure how people practice social distancing This study proposes a new method based on utilizing the frequency of hashtags supporting and encouraging social distancing for measuring social distancing We have identified 18 related hashtags and tracked their trends between Jan and May 2020 Our evaluation results show that there is a strong correlation (p &lt; 05) between our findings and the Google social distancing report
Social media and COVID-19: Can social distancing be quantified without measuring human movements?