A pregnant woman whose leg was amputated to free her after more than two days trapped in a collapsed Mandalay apartment block was pronounced dead shortly afterwards, AFP journalists at the scene saw.

Rescuers thought they had saved the life of Mathu Thu Lwin but were unable to resuscitate her after extracting her from the wreckage of the Sky Villa Condominium apartment complex, demolished by a huge earthquake which hit Myanmar on Friday.

It was a tragic end to a long struggle to free the 35-year-old with Chinese and Myanmar rescuers using a drill, a chainsaw and rotary saws to penetrate the concrete trapping her.

She was eventually brought out soon after 8:00pm (0130 GMT) and doctors examined her, performing CPR on a gurney, but she was pronounced dead shortly afterwards.

“We tried everything to save her,” said one of the medical team, but she had lost too much blood from having a leg amputated to free her.

A makeshift operating theatre that had been prepared in an outbuilding to stabilise her went unused.

The Sky Villa Condominium was among the worst-affected buildings by Friday’s 7.7-magnitude quake.

The quake reduced the building’s 12 storeys to six, and the cracked pastel green walls of the upper floors perched on the crushed remains of the lower levels.

Death toll hits 1,700

The toll from Myanmar’s earthquake continued to rise on Sunday, as foreign rescue teams and aid rushed into the impoverished country, where hospitals were overwhelmed and some communities scrambled to mount rescue efforts with limited resources.

The 7.7-magnitude quake, one of Myanmar’s strongest in a century, jolted the war-torn Southeast Asian nation on Friday, leaving around 1,700 people dead, 3,400 injured and over 300 missing as of Sunday, the military government said.

The junta chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, warned that the number of fatalities could go up and his administration faced a challenging situation, state media reported, three days after he made a rare call for international assistance.

India, China and Thailand are among Myanmar’s neighbours that have sent relief materials and teams, along with aid and personnel from Malaysia, Singapore and Russia.

“The destruction has been extensive, and humanitarian needs are growing by the hour,” the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in a statement.

“With temperatures rising and the monsoon season approaching in just weeks, there is an urgent need to stabilise affected communities before secondary crises emerge.”

The United States pledged $2 million in aid “through Myanmar-based humanitarian assistance organisations” and said in a statement that an emergency response team from USAID, which is undergoing massive cuts under the Trump administration, is deploying to Myanmar.

Myanmar’s many miseries

The devastation has piled more misery on Myanmar, already in chaos from a civil war that grew out of a nationwide uprising after a 2021 military coup ousted the elected government of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

Critical infrastructure – including bridges, highways, airports and railways – across the country of 55 million lie damaged, slowing humanitarian efforts while the conflict that has battered the economy, displaced over 3.5 million people and debilitated the health system rages on.

In some areas near the epicentre, residents told Reuters that government assistance was scarce, leaving people to fend for themselves.

“It is necessary to restore the transportation routes as soon as possible,” Min Aung Hlaing told officials on Saturday, according to state media. “It is necessary to fix the railways and also reopen the airports so that rescue operations would be more effective.”

The U.S. Geological Service’s predictive modelling estimated Myanmar’s death toll could eventually top 10,000 and losses could exceed the country’s annual economic output

No rescue workers

Hospitals in parts of central and northwestern Myanmar, including the second-biggest city, Mandalay, and the capital Naypyitaw, were struggling to cope with an influx of injured people, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) said late on Saturday.

The quake also shook parts of neighbouring Thailand, bringing down an under-construction skyscraper and killing 18 people across the capital, according to Thai authorities.

At least 76 people remained trapped under the debris of the collapsed Bangkok building, where rescue operations continued for a third day, using drones and sniffer dogs to hunt for survivors.

Myanmar’s opposition National Unity Government, which includes remnants of the previous administration, said anti-junta militias under its command would pause all offensive military actions for two weeks from Sunday.

The devastation in some areas of upper Myanmar, such as the town of Sagaing near the quake’s epicentre, was extensive, said resident Han Zin.

“What we are seeing here is widespread destruction – many buildings have collapsed into the ground,” he said, adding that much of the town had been without electricity since the disaster hit and drinking water was running out.

“We have received no aid, and there are no rescue workers in sight.”

Sections of a major bridge connecting Sagaing to nearby Mandalay collapsed, satellite imagery showed, with spans of the colonial-era structure submerged in the Irrawaddy river.

“With bridges destroyed, even aid from Mandalay is struggling to get through,” Sagaing Federal Unit Hluttaw, a political association linked to the NUG, said on Facebook.

“Food and medicine are unavailable, and the rising number of casualties is overwhelming the small local hospital, which lacks the capacity to treat all the patients.”

In Mandalay, scores of people were feared trapped under collapsed buildings and most could not be reached or pulled out without heavy machinery, two humanitarian workers and two residents said.