If voters disagreed with quarantine measures, they were free to vote those governments out.
In general, people in representative democracies don't vote on every single government decision. Voters elect representatives who vote on issues. I don't see why temporary health restrictions due to a pandemic would be any different.
In the U.S. the president at the moment got to decide how we'd respond to the pandemic as it happened. Lots of people disagreed. They got to vote in a new president, but that one vote is for a whole basket of issues. Not exactly a referendum on the pandemic, more like a decision on which faction/ideology will be in control of the federal government until the next election. Calling the pandemic response a democratic decision seems like a bit of a stretch to me.
I'm sure the situation is the same in many of the elections that you linked, most countries are republics, not democracies.
Admittedly I wonder about the modern use of the word "democracy" being used to legitimize what was supposed to be a republic, was never meant to be a real democracy, and has drifted into being a plutocracy.
> In the U.S. the president at the moment got to decide how we'd respond to the pandemic as it happened. Lots of people disagreed.
This is the case for every single decision that any election official makes. The general public doesn't vote on individual laws, unless you live in Switzerland. Calling quarantine measures "not democratic" is dishonest for this reason.
If the people vote on something I'd say that is a democratic decision. Electing the U.S. president is a democratic decision. Referendums, where they have them, like in California, are democratic decisions. I would not say that quarantines in the U.S. have been democratic decisions.
Like I said, I think the word democracy is abused. Is the U.S. a democracy? The word appears zero times in the constitution. Is the Democratic Republic of North Korea a democracy, just because they say it is? Is Russia a democracy because people get to vote?
In the U.S. we don't vote on issues, we vote on which one of two factions will be in power any given year, the same two parties for the last 150+ years, increasingly the same people over and over, rotating in and out of corporate board rooms and the media, a political class bought and paid for, seemingly more concerned with keeping the population distracted rather than representing them, happy to take on more and more responsibility even thought the population trusts them less and less. Why the need to defend this hot mess and everything it does as democratic, when technically it is not?
Thanks for the Switzerland call-out, I'll be reading more about their system.
Do governments put every single decision they make to a general vote? You're confusing representative democracy with direct democracy. How many countries postponed or cancelled elections due to the pandemic? Only those would be considered to have "bypassed democracy".