At least 73 people were killed and more than 550 injured by the devastating passage of Cyclone Sido in Mozambique, the state-run Institute for Risk and Disaster Management in that southern African country said today in a newest account of the natural disaster.

The death toll from the cyclone in Mozambique, which struck the African continent on Sunday after its devastating passage from the tiny French island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean, rose by nearly 30 deaths in a single day.

Meanwhile nearly 40,000 homes have been destroyed in the country, one of the poorest on the planet, according to the state institute.

Shinto, with winds of 260 kilometers per hour and 250 millimeters of rainfall in 24 hours, hit the northern part of Mozambique, which is often hit by cyclones.

Nearly 330,000 people have been affected by this natural disaster, mostly in the northern province of Kapo Delgado, where 66 people were killed.

Although the intensity of the cyclone lessened as it headed inland, it continued its path 500 kilometers further into Malawi on Monday, where authorities have recorded 13 deaths linked to the cyclone.

If the provisional casualty figures remain lower than the “hundreds” of deaths feared by Paris in Mayotte, Unicef has raised fears of “the spread of diseases such as cholera, malaria and water-borne diarrhoea” that are “particularly dangerous for children”, Guy Taylor, the head of the UN agency in Mozambique, told Agence France-Presse.