State media said the death toll from Monday's earthquake in China, the deadliest in nearly a decade, rose to 148 on Friday as authorities now focus on relocating thousands of displaced people.
• Also read: China earthquake: Survivors treated in hospital, death toll rises to 135
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The earthquake, which struck shortly before midnight on Monday evening about 1,300 kilometers southwest of Beijing, killed at least 117 people in Gansu province and 31 in neighboring Qinghai province, according to China's official press agency Xinhua.
In those two provinces, more than 139,000 people are staying in emergency shelters in the freezing cold, according to state broadcaster CCTV, which reported that relief efforts in Gansu are now “fully focusing their work on housing displaced people and caring for the injured.”
However, rescuers were still searching for victims trapped under the rubble in Qinghai on Friday morning, according to CCTV.
In this province, people were buried alive by a “sand volcano,” a phenomenon of soil liquefaction under the effect of an earthquake, in Zhongchuan County on Tuesday.
According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), a magnitude 5.9 earthquake injured nearly 1,000 people. Since then, dozens of aftershocks have been recorded.
This earthquake is the worst in China since 2014, when more than 600 people died in Yunnan Province (southwest).