•A newborn baby being pulled out alive from the rubble of the city of La Guaira, Venezuela
A newborn baby has been rescued from a fallen building 32 hours after the twin earthquakes that devastated a Venezuelan coastal city.
Video shared on social media Friday shows rescuers working under a floodlight atop collapsed masonry and bringing the infant out to applause late Friday in the hardest-hit city of La Guaira, north of the capital Caracas.
They carefully passed the baby, wrapped in a quilt, from person to person before cleaning the child gently with tissues, the video shows.
According to the user, Andreina Quintero, who published the video on social media, the baby was just 18 days old and was uninjured after being trapped for 32 hours.
The child’s mother was rescued an hour after the child.
In a follow-up video later on Friday, Quintero showed the mother in a hospital bed, with a medical worker telling her that the baby did not appear to have injuries.
The medic then suggests that the mother saved the baby by covering the child with her body or another object.
At least 920 people were killed by back-to-back earthquakes on Wednesday of magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5, and thousands more were injured or remain missing.
The United Nations estimated on Saturday that close to seven million people may have been impacted by the twin earthquakes in Venezuela, which have killed nearly 1,000 people and left tens of thousands missing.
The UN migration agency said it had examined available population and damage data and had determined that “up to 6.76 million people could be affected by the devastating earthquakes that struck Venezuela on 24th June”.
The projections, which include up to two million people in Caracas alone, “highlight the potentially vast humanitarian impact of the disaster,” the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) warned in a statement.
Entire buildings have crumbled in La Guaira, located to the north of Caracas, following the devastating twin tremors.
