Rescue crews saved a 10-day-old baby and his mother trapped in rubble in Türkiye on Friday and dug several people from other sites, as President Tayyip Erdogan admitted authorities should have reacted faster to this week's huge earthquake.

The confirmed death toll from the deadliest quake in the region in two decades stood at more than 22,000 across southern Türkiye and northwest Syria four days after it hit. Hundreds of thousands more people have been left homeless and short of food in bleak winter conditions and leaders in both countries have faced questions about their response.

Erdogan visited Türkiye's Adiyaman province on Friday, where he acknowledged the government's response was too slow.

"Although we have the largest search and rescue team in the world right now, it is a reality that search efforts are not as fast as we wanted them to be," he said.

He also said looting of shops had taken place in some areas.

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Erdogan is standing for re-election in a vote scheduled for May 14 and his opponents have seized upon the issue to attack him. The election may now be postponed due to the disaster.

Erdogan has called for solidarity and condemned what he described as "negative campaigns for political interest." Kemal Kilicdaroglu, head of Türkiye's main opposition party, criticized the government.

"The earthquake was huge, but what was much bigger than the earthquake was the lack of coordination, lack of planning and incompetence," Kilicdaroglu said in a statement.

Rescuers, including teams from dozens of countries, toiled night and day in the ruins of thousands of wrecked buildings to find buried survivors. In freezing temperatures, they regularly called for silence as they listened for any sound of life from mangled concrete mounds.

In the Samandag district of the Hatay province, rescuers crouched under concrete slabs, reached into the rubble and picked out a 10-day-old newborn.

His eyes wide open, baby Yagiz Ulas was wrapped in a thermal blanket and carried to a field hospital. Emergency workers also took away his mother, dazed and pale but conscious on a stretcher.

In Diyarbakir to the east, Sebahat Varli and her son Serhat were rescued and taken to hospital on Friday morning, 100 hours after the quake.

The death toll from the 7.8 magnitude earthquake and several powerful aftershocks across both countries has surpassed the 17,000 killed in 1999, when a similarly powerful earthquake hit northwest Türkiye.

It now ranks as the seventh most deadly natural disaster this century, ahead of Japan's 2011 tremor and tsunami and approaching the 31,000 killed by a quake in neighboring Iran in 2003.

The death toll in Türkiye rose to 19,388 on Friday. In Syria, more than 3,300 have been killed. Many more people remain under rubble.

Over 24.4 million people in Syria and Türkiye have been affected, according to Turkish officials and the United Nations, in an area spanning roughly 450 kilometers from Adana in the west to Diyarbakir. In Syria, people were killed as far south as Hama, 250 km from the epicenter.

Many people have set up shelters in supermarket car parks, mosques, roadsides or amid the ruins.