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Mandatory POUND cards track sexual activity between COVID-19 tests

This is satire.

Students received Mandatory POUND cards after completing COVID-19 tests upon arrival to the Oxford campus. The controversial new section of Miami’s Healthy Together plan includes a punch card for each student that tracks any and all sexual encounters between their random COVID-19 tests.

Miami faculty members claim this card is a more effective measure than the Arrival Testing Participant Cards, which do nothing, that students also received after testing.

“It seems really rude and invasive to ask for someone’s arrival testing card. It’s a bit too reminiscent of Holocaust IDs,” one professor said. “But knowing that Miami is tracking students’ sexual activity makes me feel better about teaching my classes in person even without access to the vaccine. There’s a much greater risk of COVID infection from sex than from students being on campus around others.”

POUND cards have two required modes for tracking sexual partners. After coming in contact with one another, sexual partners punch a hole in the card. They then scan a QR code on the card, adding their names to a list of fellow sexual partners stored in a confidential database with a long name shortened to the acronym “POUND.” The location, if public, is also recorded on POUND.

POUND is protected by the HIPAA privacy regulations and is only available to Miami’s student contact tracing team and Miami’s Healthy Together Committee.

“I feel a lot more comfortable about taking in-person classes now that Miami is tracking our sexual activity, because who knows where that guy you met at Brick Street has been,” one student said.

One student contact tracer also said that POUND takes some of the guesswork out of their calls, especially when people hang up on tracers who simply want to know the contacts of infected persons.

“It’s a really common problem,” the student contact tracer said. “We’re just trying to help, but students here really don’t give a fuck. I mean, some do, but they don’t remember names for all their drunken hookups.”

Meanwhile, the president of the campus Virginity Club said that not having hole punches is a source of pride.

“It proves we’re saving ourselves for God and a future marriage, but also from being infected,” the president said. “I would say it’s even more important to abstain from sex than to wear a mask during the pandemic.”

Students in the Farmer School of Business receive a different, gilded version of the punch card to promote students to actively report sexual activity. After five punches, a Farmer student will receive a job offer on Tinder’s User Experience team through Handshake.

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One fraternity brother reported that he absolutely dug the punch cards, but in the same breath, also complained about the recent switch to the COVID-19 spit test, where a testee spits in a vial sent to a lab, calling it “so gross.”

Anonymous data on the COVID-19 dashboard indicates that male students may be overreporting sexual partners, while female and nonbinary students are underreporting. A recent “Weekly Three'' mass email also warned fraternity members to stop adding fake names to the database to fulfill new fraternity pledge requirements, calling it “irresponsible” and “not representative of what it means to live out the Love and Honor code.”

The Miami Student newspaper will continue to monitor the COVID-19 monitoring dashboard for more POUND card data insights.

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