This.
It's now no mystery as to why Wejo started this thread in the first place-- because he believes there can actually be a "personal liberty choice" angle when it comes to a public health emergency triggered by a viral outbreak.
It is not a matter of individual Japanese people-- young our old-- choosing what level of risk they want to entertain. You quite literally don't have a society if there is no concept of collective responsibility in situations like this one.
With Covid, the issue is not risk to individuals who choose to expose themselves; the issue is whether individuals are allowed the freedom to create chains of transmission that are likely to end in the death of their fellow citizens. And the more infections, the greater the number of chains of infections running from the less vulnerable to the more vulnerable (and it's either that, or you have to all but imprison the vulnerable, if you can even accurately determine who, exactly, they are).
If individual Japanese people chose to spectate en masse at the OGs, they would not only be choosing to expose themselves and their families to greater risk; they would inevitably be creating chains of transmission that would lead to the deaths of individuals who chose NOT to spectate. This is likely why 80% of their population (which is older, on average, and doesn't tend to view older people as second class citizens) opposes going ahead with the event.
And another thing: As much as I, like many of you, love Olympic track and field, I have to acknowledge that the Games themselves have been hanging on by their fingernails when it comes to credibility as per their stated ideal of liberal internationalism. They have become commercially bloated national propaganda spectacles, frequently rammed down the throats of their host's citizenry for the benefit of rich developers and greedy corporate sponsors. And, they are nakedly and unapologetically exploitative of the people who supply the product: athletes themselves.
Could the Games retain any credibility whatsoever if they went ahead in a context of extreme global health inequity, as it seems would/will be the case if this edition goes ahead in 2021?
If it had happened that the world had engaged in unprecedented levels of social solidarity in 2020 and succeeded in vanquishing this scourge through superior public health measures on a global scale, then the staging of an international celebration of youth and vitality in 2021-- a year and a half after the first outbreaks-- would have been uplifting and awe-inspiring. As it is, the effort to stage them at the risk of exacerbating an ongoing an unequally born global health crisis, starting with possibly undoing the suppression measures of the Japanese people themselves, just looks grotesque.