LONDON – National traumas or major political convulsions have been familiar and bloodied territory in the latter 20th and early 21st centuries for some of the countries currently ravaged by the coronavirus.
Whether by long and brutal wars, invasions, civil wars, revolutions, terror attacks, assassinations of leaders and anti-mafia judges, or natural disasters, distress has often shaped nations psyches.
So it is for — among others — the United States, China, Iran, Italy, Spain, France, Britain and India. There are also nations that have suffered disproportionately in recent decades, with death tolls in the tens or hundreds of thousands, who have been relatively unscathed by the pandemic — such as Lebanon, Syria, Iraq or Bosnia.