Which is why the growth rate is really what matters. Which isn't immutable. It goes down if people wash their hands. It goes down if sick people stay at home.
This is also why it really matters if the rate is 150% or 130%, even if both are very bad, because the higher rate is very worse. And the rate gets lower if sick people stay home, but it gets higher if idiots panic and start hoarding masks and stealing hand sanitizer which increases the rate of infection when they aren't there for other people to use.
Panic is not just useless, it's actively harmful.
Another sign that people don't get exponential growth, even if they think they do.
So no, panic never helps. Staying calm and level headed does.
But if you want to panic, do it. But do it in private, panic itself is rather contagious as well. Maybe self-quarantine.
Here in Denmark, where we're seeing an outbreak take hold, it's the EXACT opposite.
People are going out even though they have been told to self-quarantine, even boarding planes.
A couple refused to cancel a vacation trip even though they had been asked to quarantine because their son has been diagnosed with the virus.
I really think we could use a tiny bit more panic
At this point, things are so looking so grim that there's no way to tell people not to panic without unacceptable downplaying of the gravity of the situation.
Panic is was caused the toilet paper craze.
In at least a few cases though I doubt it was not panic buying.
This should be taken seriously and people should put effort into prevention, but honestly I would prefer calling upon people's sense of civic duty rather than panic.
If that's the extent of the damage caused by panic, then we are going to be fine.
You can also have non-exponential growth and still have many new cases, if people are getting over their infections faster than they're infecting new people. If a million people were currently infected and every week 500,000 new people were infected but 500,001 of the existing infected people recovered, that means the number of currently infected people declines over time, but you'd still have 500,000 new cases every week and just about everybody might eventually get infected before it dies out, even if it eventually does. (This is similar to what happens with the flu, except that it has exponential growth in winter and then below exponential growth in the other three seasons, so the actually dying out never really comes.)
To really get rid of it you want to have something like 100,000 cases last week and 75,000 cases this week and so on. But even then you might have 25,000 fewer cases this week because 50,000 people recovered but 25,000 new people got infected.
So whether it has exponential growth or not isn't really the issue. It's what the growth rate is. A small exponential growth rate isn't catastrophic -- the number of cases grows but not so fast that everybody is infected by the time they have a vaccine or other more effective countermeasures that get the growth rate back below exponential.
Most importantly, the growth rate isn't immutable. It's affected by things like people washing their hands and having effective testing and quarantines. So will things be fine? They will if people do the right things. Maybe some of them have been and some of them haven't. Maybe they'll get better at it going forward, maybe they won't. As a result there is a significant amount of uncertainty.
But panic is useless. Even if all they can do is reduce the growth rate from 150% to 130%, that still buys more time to respond. Even if everybody ultimately gets it, better that it happen over five years than five months. And if some people are doing it wrong, try to help them do better. Everybody likes to see the bad orange man look stupid on the television, but maybe this is a situation where we come out better off with everybody working together.