Still, Americans have a way of turning to history as a kind of consolation, to give knowable shape to frightening, chaotic events. And since the crisis began, leaders have reached for analogies like Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11, which both capture the sense of shocking suddenness, and also appeal to an idea of the American story as a series of challenges that make us stronger, better, more united.

Such analogies also underline the idea of American specialness — that we are under attack, as the post-Sept. 11, refrain went, “because of who we are.” But an attack by pathogens resists that same kind of self-flattering narrative. And for some, the coronavirus crisis, instead of affirming our distinctness, is revealing how much we have in common with the rest of the world, sometimes in uncomfortable ways.

Since the crisis began, the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen has been having regular video gatherings with friends in Moscow. And what has struck her, she said, is the similarity of what they were experiencing, starting with the feeling that “we’ve been entirely left to our own devices.”

“In the United States we have all this infrastructure, and we think that all these things are going to work the way they’re supposed to when push comes to shove,” she said. “In Russia, we always knew they wouldn’t.”

Even references to America as the “epicenter” of the crisis, when per capita death rates in many other countries, including a number in Western Europe, are higher, Ms. Gessen said, reflects a wrongheaded frame.

“It’s just another aspect of us realizing we are just as vulnerable as people in other countries — and in some ways a lot more — to a thing that doesn’t recognize national borders,” she said.