Five days after one of the strongest storms ever recorded struck cities and towns in central Philippines, survivors in remote regions complained they had yet to receive any aid.
Survivors, panicked over delays in supplies of food, water and medicine after the devastating Typhoon Haiyan, have turned to looting with some digging up underground water pipes and smashing them open.
Controversy has also emerged over the death toll with President Benigno Aquino saying local officials had overstated the loss of life, saying it was closer to 2,000 or 2,500 than the 10,000 previously estimated.
His comments, however, drew scepticism from some aid workers.
Eight people were killed when looters raided rice stock piles in a government warehouse in the town of Alangalang, causing part of the building to collapse, local authorities said.
Other looters still managed to cart away 33,000 bags of rice weighing 50kg each, said Orlan Calayag, administrator of the state-run grain agency National Food Authority.
Television footage also showed soldiers sent in by Mr Aquino to restore order in the city of Tacloban firing shots into the air to scatter looters there.
Tacloban city administrator Tecson John Lim said 90% of the coastal city of 220,000 people had been destroyed, with only 20% of its residents getting aid. Houses were now being looted because warehouses were empty, he said.
"The looting is not criminality. It is self-preservation," Mr Lim told Reuters.
Some survivors in Tacloban, which bore the brunt of the storm, dug up water pipes in a desperate bid for water.
"We sourced our water from an underground pipe that we have smashed. We don't know if it's safe. We need to boil it. But at least we have something," said Christopher Dorano.
"There have been a lot of people who have died here."
The government has been overwhelmed by the force of the typhoon, which decimated large swathes of Leyte province.
Mr Aquino, who has been on the defensive over his handling of the disaster, said the government was still gathering information from various storm-struck areas and the death toll may rise.
"Ten thousand, I think, is too much," he told CNN in an interview. "There was emotional drama involved with that particular estimate."
"We're hoping to be able to contact something like 29 municipalities left wherein we still have to establish their numbers, especially for the missing, but so far 2,000, about 2,500, is the number we are working on as far as deaths are concerned," he said.
A presidential spokesman said Mr Aquino referred to estimated deaths. Official confirmed deaths stood at 1,883, with only 84 missing, a figure that aid workers consider widely inaccurate.
Some aid workers also expressed scepticism at Mr Aquino's estimate.
"Probably it will be higher because numbers are just coming in. Many of the areas we cannot access," Gwendolyn Pang, secretary general of the Philippine Red Cross, told Reuters.
The preliminary number of missing, according to the Red Cross, is 22,000. Pang cautioned that figure could include people who have since been located.
Google, which has set up websites to help people share and look for information about missing persons during catastrophes, currently lists some 65,500 people as missing from the typhoon.
The Person Finder website allows anyone to list a person missing and to search the database for names.
But Google staff warned against reading too much into the data, pointing out that a similar website set up after the Japanese tsunami in 2011 listed more than 600,000 names, far higher than the final death toll of nearly 20,000.
Foreign medical teams arrive
More than 100 tonnes of Irish emergency aid - including tents, blankets and tarpaulins - will arrive in the Philippines today.
The airlift is valued at just over €500,000.
The supplies are in addition to the emergency funding of €1m towards the relief effort announced by Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Eamon Gilmore on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Minister of State Joe Costello has said the Government is co-coordinating a rapid response corps to help aid efforts in the Philippines.
Mr Costello said the personnel are ready to fly out when needed.
He said the first priority was to make emergency humanitarian supplies available for victims of the disaster and that supplies should begin to arrive from Dubai today.
They will be distributed by UN personnel who are already in the Philippines.
UN officials said getting food, medicine and clean water to the disaster zone were the priorities, along with sanitation and shelter.
The World Health Organization said teams from Belgium, Japan, Israel and Norway had arrived in the Philippines to set up field hospitals. It said other countries were expected to provide medical teams.
More than 250 US forces were on the ground too, and a senior Marine official told Pentagon reporters he expected that number to grow every day.
The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington will arrive later this week, carrying about 5,000 sailors and more than 80 aircraft. It has been joined by four other US Navy ships.
Rescuers have reached some remote parts of the coast that were previously cut off, such as Guiuan, a city of 40,000 people that suffered massive destruction from high winds but was spared the storm surge that washed over Tacloban. Local officials say 85 people were killed in Guiuan, with 24 missing.
The typhoon also levelled Basey, a seaside town in Samar province about 10km across a bay from Tacloban. Local officials say 80 people were killed in Basey.
Unprecedented disaster
More the 670,000 people have been displaced by the storm and many have no access to food, water or medicine, the United Nations said.
Natasha Reyes, emergency coordinator in the Philippines at Médecins Sans Frontiers, described the devastation as unprecedented for the archipelago.
UN aid chief Valerie Amos, who is in the Philippines, called the scale of destruction "shocking".
Medical workers are treating the injured at evacuation centres in Tacloban for lacerations and other wounds. But many complain of a lack of food and poor hygiene.
For a list of Irish charities providing aid relief click here
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