R=1.1=everything goes to shit is not a valid inference. R is just the derivative of the case graph. It can and does change on a daily basis, says nothing about absolute levels, and says nothing about how it will evolve over time or what the actual peak levels of infections will be. You can find "exponential growth" in nearly any graph if you want, look at a sine wave for example, and viruses in particular are a curious choice to describe this way because epidemics show S-curve logistic growth, not exponential. It's very confusing to people that it's so often described as exponential because that implies unbounded and very rapid doubling until a day/serial interval before saturation half the population is infected at once, whereas we know that epidemics don't do that in reality.