More than a million people were evacuated before Fung-wong hit land on Sunday (local time), unleashing fierce howling winds, heavy rain and storm swells on the most populous island of Luzon that left some sleepless through the night.
"We could not sleep because of the winds hitting our metal sheets and tree branches falling," said Romeo Mariano, who sheltered with his grandmother in their home in the province of Isabela.
"When we got out to check our home, we saw the damage."
Early indications suggested the tally of dead would be "minimal", however, civil defence senior official Raffy Alejandro told a media briefing.
A mudslide buried a house to kill two children in the northern town of Kayapa in the province of Nueva Vizcaya, regional civil defence official Alvin Ayson said by telephone.
They followed two deaths from drowning and fallen debris.
FOUR TOWNS ISOLATED IN PROVINCE WHERE STORM MADE LANDFALL
Landslides also isolated at least four towns in the province of Aurora, where Fung-wong made landfall, Alejandro added.
Forecast to shift northeast to Taiwan, Fung-wong was packing winds on Monday whose speeds had dropped to between 120kmh and 150kmh, but remained a typhoon, whose outer bands could dump rain in coastal areas and trigger storm surges.
The storm is the 21st this year in the Philippines, coming after Typhoon Kalmaegi killed 224 last week, with five dead in Vietnam.
The back-to-back storms came as officials of more than 190 countries gathered in Brazil for Monday's opening of the COP30 climate summit.
Scientists have said rising sea temperatures pack more energy into tropical cyclones, making them more intense and boosting rainfall.
Matthew England, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, said ocean temperatures have been above average around the western Pacific where typhoons that hit the Philippines originate.
"If the oceans are warming as they are because of climate change, then that is intensifying the magnitude and the wind speed and the ferocity of these typhoons," England said.
Fung-wong is forecast to hit Taiwan's densely populated west coast on Wednesday, though its heaviest rain is expected along the mountainous east coast, where 18 people died in September in flooding unleashed by an earlier typhoon.
The government has already ordered evacuations in the town of Guangfu, the scene of those deadly floods.
