Social distancing

I don't think I had come across the phrase before, and certainly I have been very bad at socially distancing.   I have been finding it very hard keeping 2 metres away from other people at the supermarket shelves, or from other people walking in the park.  So I have found it very helpful that supermarkets have been putting markers on their floors and at the tills!

But is social distancing a new idea?

A search in Web of Science Core Collection for the phrase "social* distan*" finds a lot dating back to the 1970s, but most of it at least is from the psychology literature, seeming to describe a psychological idea, or the education literature, describing (for example) pupils or students distancing themselves from their teachers, or vice versa.

"Social distancing" finds 360, "social* distan*" finds 3491.  600 of the 3491 are in the Web of Science Category Psychiatry, 310 in Sociology, 500 or so in one or another Psychology category, and only 63 in Infectious Diseases.     A quick Google suggests "social distance" is the distance between groups in society, "social distancing" is the idea that is current now, and is also known as physical distancing.   However, searching just for "social distancing" in Web of Science does find some of those older papers from social science or mental health.

Analysing results for the wider search in Web of Science and refining to Infectious Diseases finds a lone paper from 1992, discussing leprosy, but particularly relations between professions, so perhaps social distance, rather than the current meaning of social distancing.  Then there is a gap in time, before a paper from 2003, relating to the SARS outbreak.   The abstract states "The independent effectiveness of measures to "increase social distance" and wearing masks in public places requires further evaluation."  The full text is in PubMed Central, but there seems to be no reference next to any statement using the phrase "social distance".

In other Categories, are articles from the late 1990s using the phrase, relating to AIDS/HIV, and this seems to relate to the idea of effectively avoiding people who may have the virus, rather than (and this makes sense given the way HIV is transmitted) staying 2 metres apart from them.