THANKS, FRONT-LINE WORKERS

Family’s nightly salute hits 100 days

For one Calgary family, voicing support for front-line workers has become a nightly tradition during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since March 24, Steve Raffa and his family have gone onto their back porch at 7 p.m. each night to make some noise, banging pots and pans in recognition of frontline workers, including health-care professionals and others who continued providing essential services as public-health restrictions tightened.

Thursday marked exactly 100 days since that tradition began, and the Raffa family is still going strong.

“We’re very fortunate to have some medical people involved in our family — cousins, aunts. We wanted to show respect to them,” said Brenda Tomaszyk, Steve’s mother-in-law. “As time went on, we realized that there were a lot more front-line workers, like our grocery people, delivery people, so we wanted to cover everybody.”

The idea came from a Mahogany community Facebook group, Tomaszyk said, but instead of only doing it for one night, the family carried on.

She said there hasn’t been a huge community response to the initiative, aside from some cowbells heard in response on the other side of the community lake. “We didn’t do it for the response. We did it more because we wanted our daughters to understand what they are experiencing and living through,” she said.

In Alberta, much has changed since March 24, when the family started their nightly noise-making.

On that date, Calgary reported its first death from the novel coronavirus, a woman in her 80s from the Mckenzie Towne Continuing Care Centre. That continuing-care home would go on to see one of Alberta’s worst outbreaks, with 18 more residents dying of COVID -19. As of Thursday, the virus has now taken the lives of 155 Albertans.

Also 100 days ago, there were 358 COVID-19 cases in Alberta, with new case counts accelerating. At the time, most confirmed cases were from travellers returning to the province from out-of-country. Now, Alberta has 8,208 coronavirus cases, with 542 of them remaining active.

BRENDAN MILLER The Raffa family, Steve, Tammy, Olivia, Martina and Samantha are joined by grandparents Brenda and Dave Tomaszyk to bang pots and pans on Thursday for the 100th consecutive evening showing their support for frontline workers in the pandemic. They gather nightly around 7 p.m.