  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<0.05) between our findings and the Google social distancing report.
