Foreign aid workers in Burma have concluded that as many as 50,000 people died in Saturday’s cyclone, and two to three million are homeless, in a disaster on a scale comparable with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

The official death count after Cyclone Nargis stood at just under half that by 1300 GMT today, at around 22,500 people dead plus a further 41,000 missing.

But due to the incompleteness of the information from the stricken delta of the Irrawaddy river, UN and charity workers in the city of Rangoon privately believe that the number will eventually be double that.

"We are looking at 50,000 dead and millions homeless," Andrew Kirkwood, country director of the British charity Save The Children, told The Times.

"I’d characterise it as unprecedented in the history of Myanmar and on an order of magnitude with the effect of the tsunami on individual countries. It might well be more dead than the tsunami caused in Sri Lanka."

The death toll in Sri Lanka on Boxing Day 2004 was 31,000, second only to the 131,000 who died on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Eleven countries were affected.

Four days after the Burma cyclone there is wretchedly little hard information about the victims. Seven townships have been designated as "priority one" disaster areas, because between 90 to 95 per cent of the buildings have been destroyed.

"Anything less than 60 per cent destroyed is not being counted as a priority at this stage by the government, which gives some indication of the scale of the problem," said Mr Kirkwood.

According to the Burmese Government’s figures at least 10,000 people have died in the town of Bogalay alone.

Foreign aid agencies have reported scenes of devastation, with corpses still littering the rice fields and desperate survivors without food or clean drinking water. They are either without shelter or crammed into whatever buildings remain standing.

Burma's junta refused foreign aid after the 2004 tsunami, in which between 60 and 600 of its citizens are reported to have died, but this time the sheer scale of the slowly emerging disaster seems to have forced it to change its mind. "We will welcome help . . . from other countries because our people are in difficulty," said Nyah Win, the Burmese Foreign Minister, in a rare television appearance.

Cyclone Nargis ripped across Burma's agricultural heartland with violent winds that reached speeds of 120mph (193km/h), destroying buildings and fields, toppling trees and washing away roads in the vital rice-growing area of the Irrawaddy delta.

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