Healthy 32-year-old offered COVID-19 vaccine because doctors had him down as 6.2cm tall with BMI of 28,000
- Reference: 1613754969
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/02/19/6cm_man_vaccine/
- Source link:
Diminutive Liam Thorp – or should we say Liam Thumb? – was surprised to receive a text from the NHS saying he was next up for immunisation because the 32-year-old Liverpool Echo political editor considered himself to be in rude health – if a little "on the chunky side".
[1]
The problem was that due to his supposed stature, Thorp had a body mass index (BMI) of 28,000. A BMI of 40 is enough to be classed "morbidly obese" so you can imagine that the UK's health service was concerned. The heaviest person ever weighed in at 635kg/1,400lb/100st and only had a BMI of 186.
So is Thorp a [2]Borrower or [3]The Blob ? Well, neither because, as you might have guessed, he's actually 6ft 2in (188cm) and was recorded incorrectly by his doctors.
[4]
[5]Writing for his home publication , Thorp said he was surprised by the invitation because he was aware that truly vulnerable groups had priority in the vaccination rollout, and not all had been inoculated yet.
However, he "was under the impression that when offered a vaccine you should always accept" so he booked an appointment.
After some soul-searching, he had second thoughts and rang his GP to check if there had been a mistake. He was told he had been "placed into Group 6 of the priority list" because of his weight.
The penny must have dropped among the back-office gremlins at the NHS because he received a call back on Wednesday, explaining that his details "had been put into the system incorrectly" when he registered with the GP a year earlier and that he would not be offered a vaccine at this stage. His subsequent tweet about the error went viral blew up.
So I’m not getting a vaccine next week - was feeling weird about why I’d been selected ahead of others so rang GP to check. Turns out they had my height as 6.2cm rather than 6 ft 2, giving me a BMI of 28,000 😂 — Liam Thorp 💙 (@LiamThorpECHO) [6]February 17, 2021
Yes, it's all very silly, but as a "diligent, tiny, morbidly obese journalist" Thorp started probing the local Clinical Commissioning Group to ask about the consequences of mistakes in medical records.
Dr Fiona Lemmens, chair of Liverpool CCG, told him: "I can see the funny side of this story but also recognise there is an important issue for us to address. There are millions of GP appointments taking place every day and while we take care to make sure records are accurate occasional data errors do occur.
"We are grateful to Liam for his honesty and for alerting his GP practice when he received his vaccination invitation. We would encourage anyone who has received a text invitation that they think they are not eligible for at this stage, to contact their GP practice to clarify. This will help ensure that more vulnerable people get vaccinated first."
[7]
Despite the government's [8]best [9]efforts , the UK's vaccination programme is going rather well, [10]all things considered . Sit tight, people. ®
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[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Borrowers
[3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051418/
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[5] https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/invited-covid-vaccine-because-nhs-19857990
[6] https://twitter.com/LiamThorpECHO/status/1361959447971643392?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
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[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/18/deloitte_51m_covid_testing/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/15/800m_nhs_framework/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/03/test_and_trace_not_waste_of_money_dido_harding/
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
...and someone with a BMI of 28,000 would have made an interestingly sized crater!
A 6.2cm individual with a BMI of 28000 would be about 108kg
If we assume he is a perfect cylinder with a density of 1g/cm^3, then his waistline would be around 4.7 meters.
So it's only cows that are spherical in a vacuum?
And is that waistline figure before or after impact?
I read that twitter thread yesterday morning and what is notable is the number of people reporting similar types of errors on their medical records or during interactions with healthcare workers. One person was told by someone literally standing next to her that she was a foot shorter than she actually was.
Is it possible this is BS?
I first saw it on Twitter, then on the BBC and now on El Reg. Is it possible this guy is having a laugh at our expense, and making himself a bit Twitter famous at the same time? Can the NHS really be that inept? (OK, at this point perhaps I should just not bother hitting submit - of course they can). LOL
Re: Is it possible this is BS?
Yes, it can and does happen, as you acknowledge. For multiple data types.
The smart move would be to query the systems across the whole for all patients with a BMI >50 to then sense-check the data. Only a few will be real.
Of course the clinical systems could be set up with limits to stop this but that would be sensible.
Even "smarter" would be a check for values shifting >15% for some physiological variables.
Not holding my breath
Cute. But let's not make a mole hill out of a mountain?
And, let me guess, the height entry was double-checked by a Wipro employee and triple checked by a Citibank manager?
"OK, I got those numbers ... "
"6.2 metres I assume based on the BMI."
Input range checking
and validation - sadly lacking in this case.
And for every Liam Thorp, there must be others whose data was entered incorrectly and have been put into the wrong categories
Re: Input range checking
My first thought when I heard this.
Valid data ranges not checked, if reports ate true.
If try, sad that potentially so much data could be invalid.
Size matters
Yes, lads, it truly does.
At least they handled it well
At least they handled it well.
Here in the US, Nutjob trump had ZERO vaccine distribution plan, so it's been left to the states. (Biden is supposed to be working on it; but, he expected a disorganized national distribution plan to fix, not "no plan whatsoever".) Some states have reasonable plans; some none at all. Florida was using vaccines to increase tourism(!), they said anybody over 65 could get vaccines, and the Florida travel board encouraged people to travel to Florida to get them.
As a result, here if this had happened, if you'd get the notice saying you're getting a vaccine... that's it. People here are (in most states) not doing any common-sense verification of info like this, if they did catch an error, just as likely or not it'd be like "Well, the appointment is already made"; if you decided you didn't want it so someone more deserving gets it, some states actually prohibit giving the shot to someone else and it'd be thrown out(!), others it's like at the end of the day the extra vaccines are injected into randos that are standing around waiting for "spare" vaccines. (If you get a call cancelling an appointment here, it'll probably be because you're in one of the less-organized states, and they handed out appointments in excess of their actual supply of vaccine, they're cancelling because they don't actually have any vaccine for you, not because you're 30 and healthy. That said, most is going to elderly, health care workers, etc. like it should -- just not anywhere near fast enough.)
The Osman
Liam Thorp at 6'2'' is only 5 inches shorter 1 Osman, the standard unit of (Covid-19) Social Distancing at 6'7''.
[1]https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/27/reg_standards_soviet_social_distancing_measure/
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/27/reg_standards_soviet_social_distancing_measure/
consequences of mistakes in medical records
Long ago I had a contract in a hospital trust where the Accident & Emergency computer system demanded a postcode before allowing an admission to be recorded. For occasions where an emergency patient didn't know or couldn't provide a postcode the staff had defined informally a standard dummy postcode to allow the admission to be processed. Consequently there were numerous people called John Smith (or other equivalents) with the same postcode but different medical histories. Surprisingly there hadn't been any misadventures by the time my contract ended, but my attempts to get the system amended fell dead as, so I was told, it was a centralised product for the health service at the time.
Re: consequences of mistakes in medical records
This leads to a an issue that frequently ends in steam issuing from my ears.
The compulsory ( but non-essential) data input. Filling in an online form that requires some piece of information before it will accept a "submit" even though it's something that can be added later/just not needed, for example to ask a general question. They don't need the serial number of my fridge for me to ask whether they repair that make/model or what their working hours are, that sort of thing. Sure, if the answer is they only repair that model with certain serial numbers they might have to tell/ ask me ( sounds improbable), but otherwise, do I really have to go downstairs, empty half of the fridge, stick my head in sideways and transcribe a long sequence of digits and letters onto a piece of paper held out of sight somewhere around my waist just so that I can press the (previously greyed out) "submit" button?
If it's just something simple like my not wanting to give them my mobile number (maybe out of stubbornness, but mostly because I know perfectly well that if I do they'll phone that instead of the number I've told them to) I'll fake one.
people replaced by algorithms ... or just poor coding...
I'd say this is a case of crappy programming.
Clearly anyone hired by the NHS is not going to be in the "idiot" range on the IQ score and would pick this up right away.
Obviously what happened is ... software.
Whoever coded that software never thought "Hmm, perhaps it would be a good idea to write some unit tests around the minimum and maximum possible heights in different age ranges."
... I mean, really, why would you ... erm, do something so incredibly obvious.
So, yeah, this entire event was an automation fubar - because lazy & shit coders.
The doctor entered the measurement correctly, but measured him while he was lying down.
But only after an unfortunate encounter with a steam roller?
Short and very wide eh?
Gentlemen.
We have our astronaut for the Jupiter lander mission.
This is how you crash things into Mars!