You can look at the open interest of the option chain, check out the SPY Dec 21 LEAPS, there are hundreds to thousands of open put contracts at most of the strikes, which start at $25
sure, but how much of it are actual shorts and how much of it is just hedging against long positions? it is a meaningless metric unless it's lopsidedly in favor of puts, which it isn't.
You can see open interest for both calls and puts. What you can’t do (by looking at open interest alone) is determine whether they were sold to open or bought to open. The tape (transaction data) can help determine this.