That’s correct, but I wasn’t implying the opposite; I hope my comment doesn’t read that way.

A fraction of the vaccinated population will not have 100% immunity. Even among healthy, non-immunocompromised people vaccines generally don’t have a 100% efficacy. For example, annual flu vaccines vary in efficacy, but are often around 50%.

As I said in my comment, herd immunity is a form of indirect protection. Keeping a disease from being able to spread prevents people from being exposed at all, regardless of their immunity status. If enough people are unvaccinated and there is no herd immunity, then that increases the risk for the whole population - even those who were vaccinated since generally that doesn’t guarantee immunity.

There are certainly arguments to be made about bodily autonomy and weighing individual rights against those of society. However, the idea that “the decision to not be vaccinated is an individual choice that doesn’t harm others” is incorrect, and therefore not a great argument against vaccine mandates.

if they don’t want to get vaccinated then it still won’t affect vaccinated folks.

This is actually not true, since enough people being unvaccinated can prevent herd immunity from protecting everyone.

Herd immunity is an indirect protection from an infectious disease that occurs when enough of a population has immunity (either from vaccination or prior infection). When enough people are immune, infections are unable to spread and outbreaks naturally end. This protects people within the population who don’t have immunity (unable to be vaccinated for medical reasons, vaccinated but didn’t get complete immunity, too young for the vaccine, immunocompromised, etc). It also protects those with some immunity who might still have a less severe infection.

The vaccination rate required for herd immunity depends on how infectious a particular disease is. Measles is particularly infectious, and a 95% vaccination rate is considered necessary for herd immunity. Many parts of the US have rates lower than that, which is why measles outbreaks are becoming common after the disease had basically been eradicated for decades.

That’s a good question - I hadn’t considered the size of the interaction region. It’s actually really big!

These high energy neutrinos produce particles like muons that can penetrate pretty far through the detector. IceCube is a 1km cube of ice (with light detectors throughout) and if you look at images of events, many of the detectors will light up along the muon track length. So that’s hundreds of meters long. I think that would appear as a large and faint blue haze.

The Cherenkov light is pretty directional though (in the forward direction) so it won’t necessarily be a uniformly bright glow. It’ll depend somewhat on your viewing angle relative to the incoming neutrino.

image source

I imagine it would be visible under the right conditions. It’s been demonstrated that the human eye can detect single photons. The Cherenkov photons follow an energy distribution, but for simplicity we can assume they are blue light (450 nm), which is 2.7 eV per photon. IceCube is designed to detect neutrinos with energies greater than 1 TeV. Assuming full conversion of neutrino energy to Cherenkov photons, that’s 370 billion photons per detection event. Pretty good odds on seeing that.

You are not being singled out. I’ve given the author of the other comment a warning with the opportunity to fix the rule violation with an edit, same as you. In both cases, the comments will be removed if they aren’t addressed in a reasonable timeframe.

Thanks! I forgot to put the exclamation mark at the front of the link. Hopefully it works now

lmk if there’s a better community to ask this in

Shameless plug: you could try !askscience@lemmy.world