U.S. Washington State Governor Jay Inslee on Saturday announced the suspension of all applications from counties looking to move into Phase IV of reopening with new COVID-19 cases rising across the state.

“We all want to get back to doing all the things we love in Washington during the summer and fully open our economy, but we aren’t there yet,” Inslee said in a news release. “This is an evolving situation and we will continue to make decisions based on the data.”

Inslee’s state is taking a phased approach to reopening, allowing some counties to reopen before others.

Phase IV would resume recreational activities and allow for gatherings of more than 50 people, according to the state’s “Safe Start” plan.

The northwestern U.S. state is the latest to backpedal on reopening policies due to rising COVID-19 cases and growing concern about the virus’ spread across the country.

A total of 12 states — Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas and Washington — have rolled back or paused reopening plans, according to a tally by CNN on Saturday.

More than 42,000 new cases had been reported nationwide as of late Saturday afternoon, the second day in a row that the daily increase in cases rose above 40,000, said a report by The Washington Post.

The number of COVID-19 cases in the United States topped 2.5 million Saturday with over 125,000 deaths, showed data by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

The state of New York reported 391,923 cases and 31,362 deaths, both topping the nation. But the state’s COVID-19 test positivity rate has dropped to around 1 percent, the lowest among the country’s big states, according to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

For the third time in four days, Florida set a new daily record for novel coronavirus cases with more than 9,500 confirmed Saturday.

The 9,585 new COVID-19 cases brought the state’s total to 132,545, according to figures released by the Florida Department of Health.

The Department of Health Services of Arizona reported 3,591 new cases Saturday morning, pushing the tally in the western state to 70,051.

The new lab-confirmed case number, which jumped by 5.4 percent from the previous 24 hours, exposed part of the worrisome landscape that Arizona is facing to contain the pandemic.

Texas also set a record for coronavirus-related hospitalizations for the 16th consecutive day Saturday, with 5,523 patients currently being treated, reported The Washington Post. Hospitalizations have risen rapidly since Memorial Day, when there were 1,511 COVID-19 patients in the state’s hospitals.

The number of people in the United States who have been infected with the virus is likely to be 10 times as high as the current public count of confirmed cases, hitting a striking level of more than 20 million, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The estimate is based on serology testing and the tally of registered cases, CDC officials told reporters Thursday, adding that many people, especially young people who do not show symptoms yet but have contacted vulnerable groups should get tested.

Another forecast warns that by Oct. 1, the U.S. death toll of COVID-19 would near 180,000, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) of the University of Washington. But it said the number could drop to 146,047 if at least 95 percent of Americans wear masks in public.

“There is no doubt that the United States is still grappling with a large epidemic on a course to increase beginning in late August and intensifying in September,” said IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray.(Xinhua)