The death toll in Malawi from tropical cyclone Freddy has risen to 225, the country's disaster management agency said on Wednesday, up from 190 reported on Tuesday.
The Department of Disaster Management Affairs added in a statement that 707 people had been injured in the storm and 41 reported missing, as heavy rain continued to affect several parts of the southern African country.
On Wednesday, markets and shops were starting to open again in Blantyre.
"I have two young daughters to feed," Daud Chitumba, 27, a minibus conductor told AFP as he headed to work at a local bus depot.
His house was among dozens that were swept away by a mudslide in the township of Chilobwe.
"We have to rebuild our lives and it starts with picking up the small pieces. So, I have to come to work and try to do whatever I can to move forward," Chitumba said.
President Lazarus Chakwera, who returned to Malawi on Tuesday after attending a UN conference in Qatar, was due to visit affected areas on Wednesday.
"We have arrived to a devastated nation," he said in a statement, hailing the relief efforts by volunteers.
Some lamented that government assistance has been slow in coming.
"We feel abandoned here. Just yesterday, we lost two more people who went with the mudslide as they helped to dig up the bodies. People are hungry and tired," said Fadila Njolomole, 19.
"My best friend, her brother, sister and mother went with the mudslide and their bodies have not been found. It's devastating. You can't even mourn."
Cyclone Freddy smashed into landlocked Malawi early Monday after sweeping through Mozambique at the weekend.
The storm has unofficially broken the World Meteorological Organization's benchmark as the longest-lasting tropical cyclone on record, set in 1994 for a 31-day storm named John.
Freddy became a named storm on February 6, making landfall in Madagascar on February 21 and sweeping over the island before reaching Mozambique on February 24, claiming nearly two dozen lives in both countries and affecting nearly 400,000 people.
It then returned to the Indian Ocean and gathered new force over the warm waters, then reversed course to come back much more powerful, packing wind gusts of up to 200 kilometres per hour.
Meteorologists say that cyclones tracking across the entire Indian Ocean are very infrequent -- the last occurred in 2000 -- and that Freddy's loopback was even more exceptional.