Rescuers freed four people, including a pregnant woman and a girl, from collapsed buildings in Mandalay, the city in central Myanmar near the epicentre of Friday's 7.7-magnitude earthquake, China's Xinhua news agency reported.
Chinese rescue workers in red helmets carried one survivor, wrapped in a metallic thermal blanket, through heaps of shattered concrete and twisted metal at an apartment building in Mandalay, images carried by China's state broadcaster CCTV showed.
Drone footage of the city showed a vast, multi-storey building pancaked into layers of concrete, but some gilded temples were still standing.
One survivor in Mandalay said that after rescue workers pulled him out of the rubble of his restaurant, he had rented a bulldozer with his own money to try to find the body of one of his workers and make the building safe for his neighbours.
The civil war in Myanmar, where a military junta seized power in a coup in 2021, was complicating efforts to reach those injured and made homeless by the Southeast Asian nation's biggest quake in a century.
"Access to all victims is an issue ... given the conflict situation. There are a lot of security issues to access some areas across the front lines in particular," Arnaud de Baecque, resident representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Myanmar, told Reuters.
The quake devastation has piled more misery on Myanmar, already in chaos from the civil war that intensified after the elected government of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was ousted by the military.
"The earthquake has laid bare the deeper vulnerabilities facing Myanmar's people and underscored the need for sustained international attention to the broader crisis," said UN Special Envoy on Myanmar and Australia's former foreign minister Julie Bishop, calling for access to all areas for aid groups and condemning what she said were continuing military operations.
One rebel group said Myanmar's ruling military was still conducting air strikes on villages in the aftermath of the quake, and Singapore's foreign minister called for an immediate ceasefire to help relief efforts.
In Myanmar, state media said the death toll had reached 2,065, with more than 3,900 injured and over 270 missing and that the military government had declared a week-long mourning period from Monday.
The Wall Street Journal, citing the junta, reported the death toll had reached 2028 in Myanmar, while the opposition National Unity Government, which includes remnants of the government ousted in 2021, put the toll at 2,418 as of Monday. Chinese state media said three Chinese nationals were among the dead.
With AAP.
