BEIJING, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- The death toll in Saturday's 6.1-magnitude quake in southwest China stood at 38 as of 8 a.m. on Wednesday, with the latest news of one missing.
The missing person was reported in Huili County, Yi Autonomous Prefecture of Liangshan, Sichuan Province, according to the China Earthquake Administration.
Among the dead were 27 in Huili County, five in Panzhihua City and six in Yunnan's Chuxiong.
In total, 982 people were injured, with 637 in Sichuan and 345 in Yunnan, the administration said.
The quake and aftershocks had ravaged 72 villages and towns in six Sichuan counties and 20 villages and towns in three Yunnan Province counties. Kunming, capital of Yunnan, was also hit.
The quake zone, covering an area of about 9,600 square km, is home to about 1.2 million people, the administration's quake relief director Huang Jianfa said at Wednesday's press conference.
Responding to outside conjecture, the administration's quake forecasting director, Liu Jie, pointed out at the same conference "the quake was not an aftershock of the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province."
The two quakes were two fractures in the same rift zone, and the epicenters were 550 km apart.
He also warned aftershocks of a 5.0 to 6.0 magnitude might occur in future.
About 392,000 houses collapsed or were damaged in the quake, figures from the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) showed. The direct economic loss was estimated at 3.36 billion yuan (about 491million U.S. dollars).
Though both the central and local Sichuan and Yunnan governments had forwarded more than 52,000 tents and 33,000 quilts combined to the quake zone, the MCA's disaster relief official Pang Chenmin admitted they were not enough for all the quake-affected people to spend a warm winter.
"The people in the disaster zone are facing two major difficulties, namely places to live and clothes and quilts to keep them warm," Pang said at the press conference.
There was also huge pressure on the government to ensure the people spend a warm winter due to the severe damage to infrastructure, including roads and communications in the quake zone, as well as the short time left for reconstruction before the winter arrived, he said.
The new semester for the students in the quake zone, scheduled to start on Sept. 1, was postponed because some school buildings had either collapsed or became too dangerous, Pang said.
The government has sent 1,000 large tents, each covering an area of 36 square meters, to serve as temporary classrooms to ensure all students return to school in a few days.
