Walmart beginning Saturday is resuming monitoring and counting the number of customers entering its stores, to make sure it doesn’t exceed capacity limits, as coronavirus cases surge at record rates across the country.

Dating back to April, Walmart has been restricting the number of people in its big-box stores to not exceed five customers per every roughly 1,000 square feet, or about 20% of a store’s capacity. Those levels can also vary based on local mandates, the company said

For a period of time, however, the biggest retailer in the United States had stopped physically counting people as they came inside and left.

“We know from months of metering data in our stores that the vast majority of the time our stores didn’t reach our self-imposed 20% metering capacity,” a Walmart spokesman told CNBC in an emailed statement. “Out of an abundance of caution, we have resumed counting the number of people entering and leaving our stores.”

The move comes as America continues to push new COVID records. More than 68,500 are hospitalized with Covid-19 across the country, more than at any other point during the pandemic, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project, which is run by journalists at The Atlantic. KEEP READING