Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA — “Births continued to decline while deaths continued to climb,” according to the American Samoa 2021 Statistical Yearbook released more than a week ago by the Commerce department’s Statistical Division, and cited under the section, “Vital and Health Statistics”, which presents data on births, deaths, life expectancy, marriages, diseases, patient visits and hospital discharges.

And the birth and death data in the Yearbook is reported by LBJ Medical Center.

The Yearbook says that Crude Birth Rates per 1,000 live births dropped from about 20.0 ten years ago to 13.7, while the Crude Death Rate per 1,000 deaths moved upward to 6.4. Infant Mortality Rate of 9.9, Neonatal Mortality Rate of 7.1, and Fetal Death Rate of 7.1 per 1,000 live births in 2021.

(A ‘crude’ birthrate relates to the entire population rather than a specific category.)

“Births have dropped from around 1,300 ten years ago to only 706 in 2021,” the Yearbook summary states. “Teen births — ages 19 years and below — made up about 10.5% of total births in 2021.”

Data in the Yearbook shows that in 2021 there were 734 births and 322 deaths. Between 2021 and 2010, the highest number of births — at 1,287 — was reported in 2011 while 283 deaths were recorded that year.

Also data in the Yearbook breaks down the number of births and deaths per month going back to 2010.

DOC also explained that population natural growth is defined as total births minus deaths. The natural growth of the population in 2021 was 375. Therefore, only 375 people were added to the resident population in 2021 from natural growth.

For the leading causes of death in American Samoa in 2021, the Yearbook shows the number one cause is Heart Disease; followed by Malignant Neoplasm (cancer); (3) Septicemia (blood poisoning); (4) Influenza/ Pneumonia; (5) Hypertension.

It also says that Cerebrovascular diseases came after Hypertension as the sixth highest cause of death in that order. Notifiable Diseases have been updated since 2014; however, 2015 and 2016 data are still missing.

According to the Yearbook summary report: Communicable diseases dropped from about 5,100 in 2019 to 3,900 in 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. There was also a big drop in Influenza/ Flu cases reported in 2020.

(Samoa News points out that in the U.S. this has also proven to be the case and is often attributed to wearing masks.)

For “out-patient visits”, the Yearbook says that it continued to climb in the last five years, to 130,018 visits in 2021. Renal Dialysis and Mental Health clinics seem to be the fastest growing clinics in the last decade. The average length of stay at the LBJ Medical Center in 2021 was 6.7 days and the occupancy rate was 56.5%.

On the matter of “marriage licenses”— the Office of Vital Statistics, a division of the local Homeland Security Department, reported 291 marriage licenses issued in 2021, an increase of 36% from the previous year, which recorded 214 marriage license issued in 2020.

Based on the data in the Yearbook, the year 2021 recorded the highest number of marriage certificates issued in the last 10 years. And a note of interest — in April of 2020 there was only one (1) marriage certificate issued and this is the only incident in the past 10-years where only one certificate was issued for a month.