The Hunt Regional Emergency Medical Center in Commerce is scheduled to close indefinitely at midnight Friday night, in response to staff being reassigned to assist with the surge of COVID-19 patients at Hunt Regional Medical Center in Greenville. A statement from Hunt Regional Healthcare said the closure is temporary.
“Our goal is to reopen by the end of August,” the statement said.
The facility, located on the southwest side of the city at 2800 State Hwy. 24, is the only emergency medical center in Commerce. It is operated by Hunt Regional Healthcare, which also administers the Hunt Regional Medical Center, the hospital in Greenville.
“Due to a CRITICAL COVID SURGE Hunt Regional Emergency Medical Center at Commerce is temporarily closed,” the release said. “If you have an emergency, please call 911 or proceed to the nearest emergency room in Greenville or Quinlan. For minor emergencies, visit Urgent Care located next to Academy in Greenville.”
The statement was published on Facebook. There is no information about the closure at the Hunt Regional website or on the organization’s Twitter feed.
Active COVID cases in Hunt County increased by about on-third between Aug. 4 and Aug 6. State officials reported 295 active cases of the virus in Hunt County as of Friday morning, 82 more than had been reported Wednesday.
“We are currently at double occupancy in our I.C.U.,” said Hunt Regional spokesperson Lisa Hill told KETR Friday afternoon. “A large majority of those (patients) are COVID (patients). We do not have the nursing staff to care for the number of patients that we have and we’ve run out of room. And there are no hospitals that have room that we can transfer patients to.”
Hunt Regional also operates an emergency center in Quinlan. There are no current plans to close the Quinlan facility, Hill said. The Quinlan ER typically serves a significantly higher volume of patients than the Commerce ER, which led administrators to choose the Commerce facility as the one to close so that staff there could assist at the hospital in Greenville.
“At this point, we plan to keep Quinlan open, but things are changing rapidly,” Hill said.
Statewide, numbers released this week showed about 3 in 10 people in Northeast Texas as vaccinated against the virus, with the statewide average around 4 in 10.
Carevide is hosting a vaccination clinic in Greenville 4-7 p.m. Monday at Greenville High School, 3515 Lions Lair Road; 5:30 - 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Travis Elementary/Sixth Grade Center, 3201 Stanford Street; 5-7 p.m. Wednesday Greenville Middle School, 3611 Texas Street; and 4-7 p.m. Thursday at Greenville High School. Registrations can be made in advance at https://bit.ly/3BVE93S .
Locations and other details about vaccination clinics are available at https://www.vaccines.gov/search/ .
