It's not dishonest if it's literally true, as you already admitted. This is like saying "it's dishonest to say drinking water is essential for health when obviously you'll die if someone sticks a hose down your throat and forces you to drink until you die".
It's not literally true. Exponential goes forever. A vrius will not. Where it stops is incredibly complex. It's exponential to a point, and where that point is is extremely important.
I'm not being pedantic. You have no idea what kind of spread any given strain of covid (or any virus) is going to have. You're trying to over simplify an extremely complex interaction. It could stop at 1 or it could stop at 1,000,000,000.
Back to your original post:
> They aren't even in the same realm of concern for public health.
They are depending how much a virus spreads. You're relying on an implied "exponential = huge and scary" to give your argument weight. Can you say how pervasive the spread of the delta variant will be?
