At the beginning of the epidemic and the exponential growth the size of the population doesn't really matter, the number of available people isn't the limiting

At the beginning of the epidemic and the exponential growth the size of the population doesn't really matter, the number of available people isn't the limiting factor. The structure of the population probably matters quite a bit, but the total number of people in a somewhat arbitrary region probably doesn't. Unless containment measures prevent it, at the beginning you'll always have exponential growth no matter the size of the country. I'm certainly not an expert, but I would assume that the individual, isolated outbreaks would be the most interesting numbers. Below a certain level they can be potentially contained by targeted measures, above a certain number of infected people you can't do any contact tracing or similar stuff anymore. And hospital resources are location-bound, there is only a limited amount of resource sharing you can do across the country.