A healthy 32-year-old man was offered a priority coronavirus injection because his height was recorded as 6.2cm — a little over two inches.
Liam Thorp, who stands six foot two inches tall, was listed as just 6.2cm by the National Health Service (NHS) database, giving him a body mass index (BMI) of 28,000. The NHS classifies anyone with a BMI of between 30 and 39.9 as obese, with anyone over that range as morbidly obese.
With an obesity rate off the charts, Mr Thorpe was put on a priority list for vaccinations as he counted as medically vulnerable. The mix-up suggests the NHS system cannot provide feedback to staff when impossible data is entered.
“Like most people, I’ve put on a few pounds in lockdown, but I was surprised to have made it all the way to the clinically, morbidly obese category,” Mr Thorpe told BBC Five Live on Thursday.
“It really made me rethink what I was going to do for pancake night,” he added.
It was only when Mr Thorp, the political editor at the Liverpool Echo, called his GP after getting the letter that the error was exposed and cleared.
“This led to some serious soul-searching and a quickly revised schedule for Pancake Day (I opted for four instead of five),” Mr Thorp wrote of his experience before detailing what he described as “one of the more bizarre phone calls of my life”.
The NHS staff member at the surgery told Thorp that his details had been put into the system incorrectly when he had registered with the GP last year.
“I’m not sure how he kept it together when he told me that this, combined with my weight, had given me a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 28,000,” he wrote in the Echo.
“If I had been less stunned, I would have asked why no one was more concerned that a man of these remarkable dimensions was slithering around south Liverpool,” he said.