That's a flawed analogy because it does not take into account the law of diminishing returns. In a closed environment (ie the world) there are a number of constraints that dictate how many opportunities are available for something to grow. The final outcome should be parabolic not exponential. There are some good videos on youtube about genetics that help to understand this.
The concern here was not that it would go off the scale, but that our misallocated wealth and poorly prioritized lifestyle would be impacted. Its kind of ironic that the disease would probably lead to a better outcome in the long term if you take into account our impact on the planet and environment. There's a grest doco on SBS about the Mediterranean, shot before this epidemic, that painted a pretty grim outlook for the future given the number of people occupying that area and the shortage of resources and diminishing landscape.
The law of diminishing returns also applied to civilizations, they dont just grow exponentially, but rise and fall as the constraints of their environment mean less opportunities for replication. We may be at a turning point as a species on our own parabolic trajectory. I doubt very much that this one disease is the end of the journey, I would imagine it is possibly just the first of many layers of scaling back from the heights of excess we had reached.
