The death toll from the powerful earthquake in Myanmar has surpassed 1,000, as rescuers use their bare hands to dig through rubble for survivors.

The country’s military regime said 1,002 people had been found dead after the shallow 7.7 magnitude quake hit the centre of the country on Friday afternoon, followed by several strong aftershocks.

The junta said in a statement that most of the dead were in the Mandalay, the country’s second largest city, and 2,367 people were confirmed injured.

Rescuers are now in a race against time to pull people from collapsed buildings.

“We are doing our best to rescue survivors,” Yan Naing, a rescue worker at Sky Villa Condo, told The Telegraph. One of Mandalay’s most expensive apartment blocks, the building sank into the ground when the disaster struck.

“We heard screams last night, but this morning, there was silence. We continue to do everything we can to save lives.”

Some two miles away, Dr Aung Win said Mandalay General Hospital had been “overwhelmed by the surge in patients”.

“With so few doctors and nurses, our capacity is extremely limited,” Dr Win told the Telegraph. “We urgently need reinforcements.

“It’s heartbreaking to see patients dying when they shouldn’t be, and we desperately need first aid kits. We were never prepared for a disaster like this.”

The earthquake could not have hit at a worse time for Myanmar, where one third of the population are already in need of humanitarian assistance after four bloody years of war.

With communications badly damaged, it is likely that it will take several more days for the true toll to emerge.

The military junta has made a rare appeal for international foreign assistance.

Some offers have already arrived: the United Nations allocated $5 million (£3.9 million) to start relief efforts.

Donald Trump said the disaster was “terrible” and insisted his administration would help – although this has been received with scepticism, given the scale of the US president’s recent cuts to aid.

The powerful earthquake also caused tremors in neighbouring Thailand, where authorities deployed more than 100 engineers to inspect buildings in Bangkok after receiving more than 2,000 reports of damage.

A woman was forced to deliver a baby outdoors when a hospital in the city was evacuated on Friday afternoon, and a surgeon told AFP that his team had to complete an operation outside.

But the biggest rescue mission is in the capital city’s north-east, close to the popular Chatuchak weekend market, where roughly 100 people are still trapped under an intimidating pile of rubble after a 30-storey skyscraper under construction collapsed.

Officials resumed the search this morning after labouring under floodlights deep into the night. So far at least eight people have been confirmed dead, according to a whiteboard tracking the toll at the site on Saturday morning.

The family and friends of the workers trapped inside gathered under gazebos at the site, sheltering from the blistering 36 degree heat and waiting for any sign of life.

Officials said there were indications that five or six people were still alive, but the mood on site was sombre and optimism was wearing thin.

Pat Kongporn had been waiting since 6pm local time on Friday, waiting for news of her parents. Both were working on-site when the building’s glass facade crumpled into a little more than a pile of rubble.

“I talked to my parents at 12:30 yesterday,” Ms Pat told the Telegraph – roughly an hour before the earthquake hit. When she could not contact them, she raced to the Thai capital from Ayutthaya, a city 50 miles north.

“I never thought something like this would happen, and now I feel depressed. My parents are hard-working people who have raised me since I was little. They are people who give me love,” she said, shaking her head.

“I will stay until I know the news, until my parents or their bodies are found.”

Also eagerly awaiting information was Ponsak, 29, who narrowly escaped being buried in the debris on Friday.

“I [was] so scared and I almost jumped out from the building,” he told The Telegraph, sitting on a red plastic chair as close to the destroyed building as he could get.

“I feel guilty that I’m safe, and [I couldn’t] sleep last night because I was worried about other people. I’m still shocked.”

Questions are starting to be asked about what went wrong at the site, which is far from being Bangkok’s only building under construction.

Prof Suchatchavee Suwansawas, a civil engineer and politician from the Democrat Party, told The Telegraph that although it is “too soon” to know what went wrong, it should never have happened.

He said: “Something was wrong, definitely. You see all other buildings, even high rise buildings under construction, they’re safe. So either the design was wrong or construction was wrong, but it’s too soon to reach conclusions.”

He added that Thailand had never witnessed destruction on this scale before, and the rescue efforts were being hampered by a lack of expertise.

“We need help from international experts, we’ve never had experience like this before,” Prof Suchatchavee said.

“There is some hope, they have some life signals… they have to hurry, but have to be very professional, otherwise the risk is that we save one but risk another one’s life.”