Originally Posted by
FlareArmed2
Only if the rate (1% in your example) stays constant day-by-day (or whatever the period is). However it is not staying constant but declining (mostly) every single day--the data shows this clearly. So it is not exponential.
While you are technically correct, for most people what is most important is the actual outcome in the near future, not how closely it matches a mathematical description.
For example, a constant 3% daily increase rate can be described as exponential. In that scenario, over 365 days, if you start with only one person infected at day 0, you will end up with around 50k people infected. While this is exponential growth, it probably wouldn't cause worldwide panic, because researchers will have a lot of time to find a way to fight it.
Let's say instead you have a 40% daily increase rate, that is itself decreasing by 0.2%, each day. After about 3 months the entire Earth population would end up infected. While this wouldn't be textbook exponential growth, compared to the previous example, it is clearly a much worse situation.