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After months of imploring residents to follow the state’s rules, Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Thursday issued his strongest warning yet to restaurants and bars that flout restrictions aimed at slowing the resurgent coronavirus by threatening to pull their liquor and gambling licenses.

The warning came as more regions of the state come under stricter rules, including a prohibition on indoor bar and restaurant service, and the percentage coronavirus tests returning positive results continues to rise. State health officials on Thursday announced a record high 4,942 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19

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, bringing the daily average above 4,000 cases over the past week.

“It is very serious right now, folks, and if we need to close down restaurants and bars, or take away their liquor licenses, take away their gaming licenses, we will do that,” Pritzker said during his daily coronavirus briefing at the St. Clair County Health Department in Belleville. “Because we are now heading into a peak that is beyond, potentially, where we were in March and April.”

Pritzker said the Illinois State Police will issue warnings and citations to businesses that don’t adhere to the rules, and the state will use its authority over liquor and gambling licenses if necessary.

“I think you know I’ve been reluctant to do this before because it has a very serious implication for the future of a business,” Pritzker said. “I want businesses to stay in business. I want them to survive.”

Pritzker’s warning came just after Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced her own clampdown, including a 10 p.m. curfew starting Friday on nonessential businesses and the suspension of indoor service at taverns and taprooms that don’t serve food.

Thursday’s case total tops the previous daily record of 4,554 set just six days earlier and brings the overall number of known cases to 360,159 across Illinois since the pandemic began. With 44 additional fatalities announced Thursday, the statewide death toll stood at 9,387.

After rising for 11 straight days, the statewide positivity rate on coronavirus screenings was 5.7% on a seven-day average as of Wednesday, unchanged from a day earlier. Hospitalizations also are on the rise.

The stricter rules took effect Thursday across the state’s 20 southernmost counties and will kick in Friday in DuPage, Kane, Will and Kankakee counties. Those regions join the nine counties in the northwest corner of the state that have been under tighter regulations since Oct. 3.

Under Pritzker’s reopening plan, regions are subject to so-called resurgence mitigations when the rolling seven-day positivity rate reaches or exceeds 8% for three straight days. In addition to the limits on restaurants and bars, gatherings are capped at 25 people instead of 50.

The northwest region, home to Rockford, DeKalb and Galena, has seen its positivity rate continue to rise despite the stricter rules, hitting 11.9% as of Monday.

As a result, beginning Sunday, restaurants and bars will be further limited to seating groups of six for outdoor service, down from a cap of 10, and gatherings will be limited to 10 people, among other rules.

As more of the 11 regions in Pritzker’s plan have seen their reopenings partially rolled back, there’s been a renewed pushback from state legislators, local officials and the restaurant industry.

The Illinois Restaurant Association, which stood with Pritzker when he announced a statewide shutdown of indoor dining in March, issued a statement late Wednesday blasting the governor’s latest moves.

“Moving backward in this manner spells complete devastation for the restaurant industry,” Sam Toia, president and CEO of the restaurant association, said in a statement. “The extreme measures outlined by the governor’s team will result in the permanent closure of countless restaurants statewide, eliminating thousands of jobs and desolating communities inhabited by millions of residents.”

As the region comprising Lake and McHenry counties edges closer to the 8% test positivity rate that would trigger a crackdown, officials in the northwest suburbs are questioning how the Illinois Department of Public Health tracks the data. The combined positivity rate for Lake and McHenry counties was 7.8% as of Monday, up from 6.3% a week earlier.

State Rep. Steve Reick, a Republican from Woodstock, on Thursday called on the state agency “to update their numbers to reflect what he considers to be more accurate numbers charted by the McHenry County Health Department.”

Reick suggested McHenry County Public Health Administrator Melissa Adamson faced pressure from state officials “to back away from her numbers.”

“One week ago IDPH reported a positivity rate of 8.4% for McHenry County and the county health department reported a rate of 6.2%,” Reick said in a statement. “When 8% is the threshold for heightened mitigations, we should be using correct numbers and not numbers that haven’t been verified and scrubbed of duplicates and non-county positive tests.”

The state last week listed McHenry County as one of 34 counties on a “warning list” for reaching state-set thresholds that indicate a resurgence of COVID-19 in the area.

McHenry County Board Chairman Jack Franks, a former Democratic state lawmaker, said in an interview Thursday on WBEZ’s “Reset” program that the county’s COVID-19 numbers are more accurate “and using the state’s numbers will likely push our region into mitigations sooner than necessary.”

“If we do end up having to be in further mitigation, I don’t want it to be artificially sooner or artificially longer because the state uses a methodology that could be improved,” Franks said. “Our county health department works hard to ensure that multiple positive tests on the same person weren’t counted separately, but the Illinois Department of Public Health counts each positive test.”

In response to such criticism, Pritzker asked fellow public officials and the hospitality industry “to stop fighting and trying to find some flaw in the data, trying to find somebody who will say that a bar or restaurant is not a spreading location.”

The governor reiterated that the state is prioritizing businesses in the affected regions for grants available as part of the federal coronavirus relief effort.

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“We’re working very hard, but we need everybody’s help in the public,” Pritzker said. “We need the restaurant owners and bar owners to follow the mitigations.”

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