An additional 14 victims have been recovered from the Champlain Towers South site, bringing the total of confirmed fatalities to 78, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Friday.
Forty-seven victims have been identified and next of kin notified, the mayor said, with 200 residents accounted for and 62 potentially still unaccounted for.
"This is a staggering and heartbreaking number that affects all of us very deeply," Levine Cava said of the new death toll.
Recovery workers toiled for a 16th day to find victims in the rubble of the collapsed condo in the Miami-area with Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett reassuring families the work to recover victims was still continuing with all urgency.
The fire department met with families Thursday afternoon, where Burkett said a representative told them "that the Miami-Dade Fire Department will not stop working until they've gotten to the bottom of the pile and recovered every single one of the family's missing loved ones."
READ MORE: The rest of the collapsed Florida condo has been demolished
"The speaker further said that I can assure you, we are not stopping. And your missing children are coming back to your family," Burkett added.
Four more victims were recovered from the debris Thursday, bringing the death toll to 64. Thursday capped off two weeks since the Champlain Towers South condo building collapsed in the middle of the night, setting off one of the deadliest building collapses in US history, not including acts of terror or fires.
Paraguay's foreign minister said in a radio report on Thursday that the body of the sister of that country's first lady was among those found.
Several Latin American citizens were reported in the building when it collapsed.
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The painstaking search for survivors shifted to a recovery effort at midnight Wednesday after authorities said they had come to the agonising conclusion that there was "no chance of life" in the rubble of the Champlain Towers South condo building in Surfside.
Hope of finding survivors was briefly rekindled after workers demolished the remainder of the building, allowing access to new areas of debris. Some voids where survivors could have been trapped did exist, mostly in the basement and the parking garage, but no one was found alive. Instead, teams recovered more than a dozen additional victims.
No one has been pulled out alive since the first hours after the 12-story building fell on June 24.
State and local officials have pledged financial assistance to families of the victims, as well as to residents of the building who survived but lost all their possessions.
Meanwhile, authorities are launching a grand jury investigation into the collapse. And at least six lawsuits have been filed by families.
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