Wouldn’t be enough to form pheromone trail strong enough to cause other ants to follow.
At best it would just cause ant mills to slowly bleed ants into their surroundings where individuals are at a high risk of predation or simply becoming lost and starving anyway. At worst they follow a random path back into the ant mill.
If it's truly a "death spiral" aren't they all going to die anyway? The off chance that one breaks the loop and finds it back to the colony seems better than just infinitely going in a loop. But I'm no ant entomologist haha
You should watch the videos of these things. They have thousands of individual ants in them, sure having one or two break away and making it back is better than zero. But it’s better in the same way that zero rice falling out of bag is better than one or two grains falling out, zero is definitely better, but nobody bothers to pickup dropped grains of rice.
