Social Media and COVID-19: Can Social Distancing be Quantified without\n Measuring Human Movements?

The COVID-19 outbreak has posed significant threats to international health\nand the economy. In the absence of treatment for this virus, public health\nofficials asked the public to practice social distancing to reduce the number\nof physical contacts. However, quantifying social distancing is a challenging\ntask and current methods are based on human movements. We propose a time and\ncost-effective approach to measure how people practice social distancing. This\nstudy proposes a new method based on utilizing the frequency of hashtags\nsupporting and encouraging social distancing for measuring social distancing.\nWe have identified 18 related hashtags and tracked their trends between Jan and\nMay 2020. Our evaluation results show that there is a strong correlation\n(P<0.05) between our findings and the Google social distancing report.\n