Brickbat: The Height of Incompetence

Liam Thorp is in his 30s and has no conditions that put him at a higher risk of death or serious illness from COVID-19, so he says he was surprised when the United Kingdom's National Health Service contacted him to offer a vaccine against the disease. He called his general practitioner, who found that Thorp had been moved to a high-priority category because his body-mass index was listed at 28,000. A BMI of 30 or higher is considered obese. It turned out NHS records had Thorp's height at 6.2 centimeters. Thorp is actually 6 ft. 2 in.

Comments

[IceTrey]

Well there you go Brits don't know what feet an inches are.

[Don't look at me!]

Calling it the English system is just a coincidence.

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[markm23]

How did they get a measurement in feet and inches, decades after supposedly converting to metric? And did anyone with an IQ above room temperature read that entry? 6.2 centimeters is the size of a mouse. A two-month premature baby is two or three times that long.

[m4019597]

He probably gave his measurements incorrectly on a routine health form and some ignorant clerk typed it in without noticing.

Not a big mystery.

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[SQRLSY One]

I don't get it! So who is incredibly dense here, Liam Thorp or the NHS?

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[Fist of Etiquette]

That's what you get for using the metric system, fatty.

[RabbiHarveyWeinstein]

Why should manlets even be allowed to live?

[Longtobefree]

Coming soon to your town.

[Jerry B.]

Hey, if it moves you up in the queue...

[JFree]

So how did they solve the discrepancy?

[Vernon Depner]

They don't dare solve it. That would be admitting that someone made a mistake. Haven't you ever seen Brazil?

[TangoDelta]

Sorry but if he's got a BMI of 28,000 at 6.2 cm tall correcting it to 6'2" (188 cm) still doesn't get his BMI under 30. Be the bigger man you really are and just take the shot.

[MatthewSlyfield]

It would be just barely over 30, and you can easily hit that with low body fat and high muscle mass.

[TangoDelta]

Well yeah, BMI is an inherently flawed statistic. Functionally it's weight divided by area and therefore it has units of pressure which is ridiculous.

[MatthewSlyfield]

I reversed the BMI formula (BMI = kg/m^2) to solve for weight using the 28K BMI and the 6.2 cm height (BMI * M^2 = kg where M = 0.062) . Comes to a little over 107kg which would be around 235 pounds. 6' 2" and 235 pounds could easily be a very fit athlete.

[TangoDelta]

Sure, but it's still flawed as a measurement. It was created by doctors pulling a rule of thumb out their backsides that only really applies to a fairly narrow subset of people. The healthy range for tall people like a 7' basketball player is 180-240 pounds, really? You might find a few players at the top end of that range but most will be above that since as you say, they're fit athletes, but I'd think even a non-athlete 7' tall at 180 pounds would be considered gaunt.

Likewise it doesn't work at all for children as the CDC uses a silly percentile scale to determine healthy from obese. By definition the BMI has to be between the 5th and 85th percentile to be considered healthy for a particular age. Which is absurd since same height, same weight but different age can mean the difference between being obese (tall younger kid) and healthy ("normal" height older kid). Also can we actually say that only 5% are underweight and exactly 15% are overweight or obese? Seems wrong to me.

[MatthewSlyfield]

"It was created by doctors pulling a rule of thumb out their backsides that only really applies to a fairly narrow subset of people."

Actually it's worse than that. BMI was created because people were complaining about flaws in the old height/weight charts (really all the same flaws BMI has).

Rather than fixing the flaws, they tried to hide them by converting the old charts into a mathematical formula.

But of course the formula is difficult, so the charts came back in a slightly modified form.

[Rossami]

That's very funny.

And you made me actually run the calculations.
To get a BMI of 28,000 at 6.2 cm, you'd have to weigh 107.5 kg (237 lbs). At that weight but the correct height of 6'2", your BMI would be 30.5 - obese but not by much. The actual standard used in the UK to bump someone up in the vaccination priority list is morbid obesity which means a BMI greater than 40.* A 40 BMI would require a 6'2" person to weigh more than 312 lbs (141 kg).

* You can be "morbidly" obese at a lower BMI if you also have obesity-related health problems such as diabetes but that does not appear to apply to this case.

[MatthewSlyfield]

BMI by itself in isolation is not diagnostic of obesity. Muscle is much denser than fat. Someone with high muscle mass and low body fat can easily hit a 30.5 BMI.

[m4019597]

He’s still a fatty. I’d never date a man, woman, or ape heavier than 180 pounds, regardless of height.

[BigT]

At least they didn’t crash the Mars lander!

[Earth Skeptic]

Why does height have to be measured standing up? Plenty of people want to spend life sitting, or lying down. They deserve to be measured in whatever posture they identify with. You racists!

[The Encogitationer]

A wise man once said to a tall woman we're all about the same height laying down.

[markm23]

6.2 cm is 2.4 inches. The only way an adult can be that thin is to lay down in front of a steam roller. A newborn baby's skull should be more than twice this in all directions.

[mad.casual]

"We're gonna need a smaller needle."

[Sevo]

We are constantly told by progtards here that the Brit NHS is the gold standard.

[CE]

So someone actually was knee high to a grasshopper.

[The Encogitationer]

And Lisa Douglas from Green Acres says: "It's a human hots-cake, Dah-links!"

[markm23]

Why in heck did the computer accept the entry of 6.2cm for the height? That is incompetent programming.

[Art Stone]

It's time to eat a hundred Big Macs in order to qualify to get the vaccination.

Hello, moral hazard!