An 18-day-old baby was pulled alive from the wreckage of an eight-storey building in the Venezuelan coastal city of La Guaira early on Friday, more than 32 hours after back-to-back earthquakes struck the region. The child’s mother, Dayana Patiño, was extracted from the same debris about an hour later, according to local volunteers and video footage verified by news agencies. Medical sources reported that neither the infant nor the mother had suffered fractures, and the mother was said to have shielded the baby with her body throughout the ordeal.

Rescue workers and family members had been searching the collapsed structure since Wednesday, when two tremors of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 hit within hours of each other. Relatives told local media they heard the mother’s voice and the baby crying on Thursday morning, but it took until the early hours of Friday to clear a passage through the rubble. Footage shared widely on social media shows the infant being passed carefully between rescuers under floodlights, wrapped in a blanket, to applause from the crowd, before being handed to the father.

The official death toll from the earthquakes has been revised several times. Jorge Rodríguez, president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, said on Saturday that 1,430 people had been killed and more than 3,200 injured, while earlier government statements had put the figure at 920. The United Nations humanitarian coordination office estimated that over 50,000 people remain unaccounted for, and warned that the number of victims could rise significantly as search operations continue. La Guaira, a densely populated coastal state north of Caracas, was declared a disaster zone, and authorities restricted access to facilitate the movement of emergency vehicles.

Separately, a pregnant woman gave birth shortly after being rescued from the rubble in the same region, according to a Venezuelan news portal, though details of that case remain sparse. International rescue teams, including contingents from Spain and Brazil, have joined the effort, and the Venezuelan government says more than 1,600 foreign personnel are now on the ground. As of Saturday, search-and-rescue operations were ongoing, with volunteers and relatives still digging by hand in some areas, but the likelihood of finding further survivors was diminishing, aid officials said.