Opinion: My elderly father spent 36 hours searching for urgent hospital care. It was entirely preventable.

Covid-19 recently became more than an abstraction for my father. He wasn’t diagnosed with the disease, but he did spend several days crisscrossing central Wisconsin in search of a hospital bed and a doctor to provide the urgent care he needed. Not long ago, I awoke at 12:20 a.m. to a phone call no daughter wants to receive. My elderly father — a dementia patient who resides at a memory care facility in Wisconsin Rapids — had fallen, hit his head and was bleeding profusely. He was on his way to the local emergency room, all alone.