I'm a technologist but somehow have found that my friend group is mostly English professors, and they are not idiots. This conversation comes up every time we hang out, with them stating that "exponential just means a lot."
Examples help quite a bit. Tell a story, a gamma ray causes a mutation in the very room you are in and causes a common virus to be virulent and deadly. It takes 2 days to make you sick enough to spread and is virulent enough for each person to spread it to 8 people on average.
So 8^11 is about the people on the planet, so in 11*2 days everyone on the planet will have it. Sure one a noticeable fraction of the planet have it, the rate of spread will slow, that's called heard immunity.
Then maybe discuss how with such quick growth that some countries drop the ball. What looks like a over reaction while it's happening looked like a under reaction in hind sight. Mention specifically Wuhan, NYC, and Italy as examples.
Might also be worth mentioning that in the 1918 pandemic the first wave broke records, made the news, encourages changes like social distancing and masks. But it was the second wave that was worse, caused by opening up things to quickly.