Counting the Scattered Crowd on June 4th Candlelight Vigil in the midst of COVID-19

The 31st anniversary of the June 4th Candlelight Vigil was banned for the first time since 1989, and the organizer would not estimate the number of people. In light of the pandemic and upcoming National Security Law, many citizens still mourned everywhere in HK. As the June 4th mourning blossomed all over the place, crowd estimation became more difficult. I examined different pictures, media reports and made a rough count for record-keeping purposes.

Figure 1. Different zones of crowd in Victoria Park, HK.

Based on the aerial photograph, the Victoria Park was divided into different zones (Figure 1). Each football field has five dashed lines, and the attendees on each dashed line was counted and multiplied by the area. This calculation derived the average crowd density in the football field to be 0.52 people per square meter. Just for reference - the crowd density is about 0.3 people per square meter at an average social distance of 6 feet per person. Using different crowd density on the sidewalk and different entrances, there were about 17,000 people in Victoria Park (Table 1).

Table 1. Calculation of crowd density, area and count.

The crowd gathering in other places is relatively small. I gathered the information from Ming Pao, Oriental, AppleDaily, theStandNews, HK01, RTHK, Independence Media, Facebook, and crowdsourcing from readers, etc. to calculate the average number of attendees in each region. In addition to Victoria Park, hundreds of people attended Sai Ying Pun, Mong Kok, Whampoa, Tsuen Wan, Kwun Tong, Tseung Kwan O, Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai, Sha Tin and Tai Po (Figure 2). Although there are no official estimates in several places, there were more than 7,000 mourners outside of Victoria Park. Together with Victoria Park, the total number of attendees of June 4th Candlelight Vigil is about 24,456.