LAST week’s whirlwind named Pope Francis left many of us starstruck and awed more than any real typhoon could. The visit of the people’s Pope to Manila and Tacloban mobilized roughly 4.5 million in his Mass in Manila last Sunday. All in all we estimate that around six million have cumulatively attended to and tried to view the Pope along the streets and in his events from his arrival to his departure to Rome a few days ago.

On his arrival, most of us lined along the route from the Villamor Air Base going to the Vatican embassy (or the Apostolic Nunciature). The crowd that gathered along that 16 kilometer stretch of road from Villamor to Quirino Avenue was estimated to have reached around 400,000. This number is a result of our earlier estimate using a density of at most 6 people per square meter. Using that density, around 24,000 people can line up along a kilometer of road. Simply multiplying the length with the number of people per kilometer will give us 390,000 which we can round up to 400,000. Note that the density is not uniform along the route and at some areas the crowd were standing only on one side of the road.

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