@fra-san Actually, that's low. Everyone's worried that there are a lot more unreported cases out there. There's widespread criticism that the Govt isn't doing enough testing.
Though in fairness, India has moved with lightning speed by its standards.
A lot of things have been shut down this past week already.
Most of the rest have now been shut down.
@fra-san Yes, the numbers coming out of Italy are horrible.
Multiply by 20 or something, and you get the potential impact for India.
Even Indian politicians understand that, I think. And they don't understand much.
@fra-san I hope you are doing ok. Are you sitting at home?
@fra-san when exactly did they put the lockdowns in place again? What with the incubation time and the time it seems to take for serious symptoms to come up, one would think the lockdown would start showing some effect after two weeks.
@ilkkachu That is what I think, too. Authorities predicted the peak of infections for somewhere in the next few days. Though it will probably happen a bit later, I guess.
@ilkkachu The current restrictions (to commercial activities and individual movements) are in place since March the 8th. They are supposed to end on the 3rd of April, but I think everybody knows they will be extended.
@fra-san was that the stricter restrictions? For what I gather from the news, a number of countries in Europe put up milder restrictions first, and then had to tighten them. And that's what I'm expecting to happen here, too. They only put up any meaningful restrictions at the start of this week.
@FaheemMitha Yes, I'm "serving" my confinement. And doing ok, fortunately.
@ilkkachu Time is crucial, and countries are probably getting it wrong one after another, as we did. Restrictions in Italy have been allowed (the Act that gave authorities the power to impose them) on February the 23rd, first enforced on March the 8th and tightened on March the 9th and 11th.
One problem in India is that people are not good at following instructions. And there is also a lunatic fringe, which isn't actually that much of a fringe.
@FaheemMitha Basically yes. Just two weeks ago we used to think that the few cases we had would have been isolated and handled. Apparently we were wrong.
@fra-san Actually, before March the 8th, strict restrictions were already enforced in limited areas. And some pretty mild ones in the rest of the country.
@ilkkachu Sorry, my last message replied to myself while, it was intended to address this one of yours.
I was wondering which place is worse infected: - a place with 1.2k tests, and 0.9 positives - a place with more populations with 30k tests, and 7k positives?
Is the test positive rate a reasonable measure?
Isn't it that only people with symptoms get tested? (and then if taking into account availability of tests, ...)
@Tim It depends. It's not the same everywhere. In Italy, yes, only people with symptoms are tested, and only if the symptoms can not be explained by something else.
Anyone know how to make services start persistently on WSL ubuntu? (or maybe I'm just not doing it correctly for ubuntu in general). For some reason the cron service on my wsl system doesn't start automatically. I have tried: sudo update-rc.d cron enable but it doesn't seem to work.
(The command executes successfully but when I restart the machine cron will not be running)
@FaheemMitha Tests are mostly effective at specific stages, I guess. In the early ones they probably are (when it makes sense to target limited groups in a population).
@Tim No, I think it'd be impossible to answer just based on those ratios. Other important factors are at play: time (how much time ago were the first persons infected?), age structure of the population (e.g. younger people are more likely to only show mild symptoms, and so less likely to be tested), testing strategy, etc.
@Tim I don't know. You are right, it depends on how the denominator is defined. Unless 100% of a population is tested at exactly the same time, the positives-over-tests ratio doesn't seem so meaningful.
There seem to be a rather small number of people in chat today. Perhaps surprisingly, since with the virus, I would expect a higher proportion of people to be staying home.
In any case, I could use some help.
So, I have a US bank account with Capital One. I think I talked about it here, around August 2019.
But in their wisdom. C1 requires 2 factor authentication using a US mobile phone.
This can be a problem if one is living elsewhere, and doesn't want to spend the money for a US phone, which is kind of expensive. And they are fairly useless for someone who isn't living in the US.
Anyway, I found a company called anveo.com, which seems like a relatively good shot for a phone number that would be able to emulate a US mobile phone sufficiently well enough to be able to persuade Capital One to send it a SMS. Apparently Capital One is fairly fussy which carriers it considers "worthy".
Anveo works via prepayment. But they only use Paypal (yay). I just tried to complete a payment for Paypal with my US credit card, but while it I was trying to fill in the form, it kept changing it to say that the country was India, rather than the US.
I was thinking that using a VPN in the US might be the simplest way to get it to stop doing that. I've been trying to use ProtonVPN, but have been having some difficulty in finding the name of a US server.
This is all very confusing. Just one question - do I need to be a paying client to download whatever it is? Because I don't see a way to do it otherwise.
Looks like I need to select server configs.
And looks like I did excactly the same thing back in August 2019, but forgot. Maybe I s should make some notes.
@terdon I'm not sure why the ProtonVPN don't say to put that ovpn file in the \etc directory, rather than leaving it in Downloads.
Anyway, I've now made a short note for myself, with hopefully sufficient instructions.
@terdon Ok, the payment to Anveo completed, at least. Thank you for your help.
I'm relieved that Paypal apparently wasn't able to detect I was using a VPN, or didn't care.
When did doing financial transactions become so stressful?
Amazon Prime Video knew I was, for example.
Over the years, I've resisted suggestions from Paypal that I create an account. I don't exactly know why, but I've always felt it was a bad idea. Perhaps I researched it at some point.
But it isn't a question of public or private, it's a basic configuration idea: your stuff goes to home, /etc is for system-wide stuff. And the server you want to connect to with your VPN is a "your stuff" thing, so at least it is reasonable for them to suggest ~/. If you don't like it, you're free to use /etc, but it isn't odd that they don't tell you to.
@terdon The only difference for me is that I have more colleagues that are also working from home, and suddenly there are a lot more Zoom meetings. ... even for the coffee breaks :-)
@FaheemMitha I'm usually doing the calls on a 11-inch (?) MacBook Air. It works. I've also started using my much larger iMac monitor, but he MacBook does work nicely.
@Kusalananda I imagine video conferencing on big screens. Like in the Hollywood big budget action movies. Like Mission Impossible and stuff. Perhaps with floating pictures in the air. But I guess that's still SF for now.
@FaheemMitha Nah, you just have to see the person who's currently talking. Sometimes I don't even look at the video but focus on a browser window or a terminal, depending on what the meeting is about.
