As a 7.7-magnitute earthquake shook Myanmar and left over 1644 dead and thousands more injured, tremors were felt as far as south-western China.

Footage shared by CNN shows the nurses clinging to the babies as the hospital was rocked by the tremors.

Beijing’s foreign ministry says no Chinese citizens were killed in the powerful earthquake.

The country’s military government says more than 1,600 people have died so far.

But experts fear the real toll will be far higher and could take weeks to emerge.

The US geological survey estimates the death toll could surpass 10,000.

A team from China has since been deployed to Myanmar to assist with search and rescue efforts.

The earthquake is the most powerful to hit Myanmar in a century.

“The force that a quake like this releases is about 334 atomic bombs,” geologist Jess Phoenix told CNN.

Another seismologist said that the quake was like a “great knife cut into the Earth.”

James Jackson, from the University of Cambridge in England, told CNN the earthquake was caused by a rupture that lasted for “a full minute,” causing sideways movements on the ground.

“Think of a piece of paper tearing, and it tears at about two kilometres per second,” he said.

However, the powerful phenomenon was “not an unexpected event,” Shengji Wei, principal investigator at the Earth Observatory of Singapore said.