More than 100,000 of Vanuatu's population of 270,000 have been left homeless when Cyclone Pam hit the Pacific nation on Friday night, according to an estimate by Oxfam Country Director Director Lolin Collett van Rooyen.

He said the category 5 cyclone destroyed almost every school, evacuation centers are jampacked, and there is overcrowding in health facilities, and even in morgues where survivors bring in bodies.

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'Save the Children' Vanuatu director Tom Skirrow says the logistical problem in the country is even worse than when Super Typhoon Haiyan battered the Philippines in November 2013.

Haiyan had claimed 7,350 lives and devastated an area as big as Portugal.

"I was present for the Haiyan response and I would 100 percent tell you that this is a much more difficult logistical problem," Skirrow said.

"The numbers are smaller but the percentage of the population that has been affected is much bigger," he noted.

In Vanuatu's capital of Port Vila, 90 percent of houses have been devastated by the cyclone.

Care International spokesman Tom Perry says the extent of damage is "startling."

Port Vila "has been flattened. All the greens are basically horizontal. Trees are just kind of standing like broken toothpicks. It's hard to find a home that has not been hit," he says.

Flights over Vanuatu's remote islands show utter destruction.

Skirrow says Efate, which is the north part of the island, is still isolated and no reports from the area have reached the capital.

He expects the number of cyclone-affected persons to climb to 150,000 in the coming days, and 75,000 of them will be children.

Unconfirmed reports put the death toll on Tuesday at 44. But the figure is set to rise as more data are collected from Vanuatu's more than 80 outlaying islands.

Cylone Pam has also hit countries across the South Pacific including the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Fiji, Tuvalu and Papua New Guinea.

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