Communities hold parades for medical personnel, first responders while practicing social distancing

Communities across the country are celebrating their first responders and medical personnel battling the coronavirus pandemic by conducting parades — while practicing social distancing, of course.

Residents and officials in St. Albans, Vermont, say they will continue to conduct their weekly parade at 6 p.m. Mondays for as long as COVID-19 stays around, filling up the Northwestern Medical Center complex.

“We don’t even blow on our sirens,” said St. Albans Police Department Chief Gary Taylor. “It’s brief, it’s meant to be something positive, there’s just so much negativity right now.”

Ambulances, police cars and fire trucks with flashing lights took a celebratory lap Tuesday in a suburb of Indianapolis, to the applause of residents standing on their lawns. In Rochester, Minnesota, home to Mayo Clinic, emergency vehicles drove from one hospital campus to another.

“We pray for them every night,” resident April Benson told Rochester TV station KAAL.

Chief Taylor said he hopes the parades will spread across the country. Monday night, as cruisers from his 30-officer staff circled the hospital, employees and patients stood at their windows and waved.

“There were a lot who came out,” the chief said, adding his officers in his have been impacted the respiratory illness.

Of the nearly 300 COVID-19 cases in Vermont, two St. Albans officers are out on quarantine, pending tests. The police force lacks personal protective equipment and hand sanitizer, but helped put together a 50-bed field hospital on a nearby sports complex.

The parades likely will continue for awhile. Health officials say the impact of the coronavirus will be devastatingly high among the nation’s front-line workers, from the paramedics graduating early in Chicago to assist in ambulances to the New York informing a wife via FaceTime that her spouse is dying.

Reports from Spain show that nearly 14% of its confirmed cases are medical professionals. A doctor’s organization in Italy says 50 doctors have died in that country’s fight against the contagious respiratory illness.

In the United States, two health care workers were among the first to die in New York. Los Angeles authorities reported a health care worker among those who had succumbed to the coronavirus this week.

“It’s important not to look too far into the future,” Regardt Ferreira, an associate professor at Tulane University School of Social Work, told HealthLeaders Media. “It’s better to go day-by-day because if you try to look two or three months into the future, fear can lead to anxiety and depression.”

But the desire to laud doctors, nurses, paramedics and other health workers has spread rapidly.

A line of cars honked and their drivers waved in a parking lot outside a health care facility Wednesday in Bath, New York. And a petition on Change.org calls on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to host a ticker tape parade for health workers down Manhattan’s “Canyon of Heroes,” where the feats of astronauts and athletes have been celebrated.

In San Jose, California, a mural on a wooden fence depicted masked caregivers in scrub uniforms and stethoscopes with a quote from Winston Churchill: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”

In Georgia, a church organized a card shower for health care workers and patients.

By Wednesday evening in St. Albans, Chief Taylor’s parade already had gained hold as law enforcement chiefs from around Vermont announced that a statewide parade for first responders and health care workers would take place next Monday.