jaipur

Updated: Apr 20, 2020 11:22 IST

There were 17 new cases of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) in Rajasthan on Monday morning, pushing the state’s tally closer to the 1,500-mark, news agency ANI reported citing the health department.

The desert state has the fourth-highest number of Covid-19 cases in the country, which reported there were 17,265 infections and 543 fatalities on Monday morning, after Maharashtra, Delhi and Gujarat.

The number of people who have contracted the coronavirus disease in Rajasthan so far is 1,495 with 24 fatalities and 205 recoveries, ANI reported.

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The agency also said that a 62-year-old man from Nagour died in a hospital on Sunday night. He was also suffering from hypertension, the agency said citing the Rajasthan health department.

The new cases were in Ajmer, Banswara and Nagour at one each, Jhunjhunu, Jodhpur and Kota with two each and eight in the state capital of Jaipur, according to the health bulletin at 9am.

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The state government has said the pace at which Covid-19 is spreading in Rajasthan has slowed. Its health department had said that the daily rise in the number of cases had slowed in the last past five days, indicating a flattening of the Covid-19 curve.

Rajasthan’s health minister Raghu Sharma said the decrease in Covid-19 was because of the efforts made by the state government to stanch the number of new cases. Sharma also claimed that those who had died of the virus also suffered from co-morbid conditions and their deaths could not be attributed to Covid-19 alone.

The state’s additional chief secretary (health) Rohit Kumar Singh had said on Saturday that had the virus spread at the same pace as it did in the first phase of the lockdown (March 25 to April 14), the number of people infected would have been 1679 but because of stringent measures adopted by the state, the number had been limited.

According to the health department’s data, people in the age group of 20-40 years were most susceptible to the virus in Rajasthan.