People tend to panic over things that are new. I expect most of the panic is people contemplating what could happen though, and the reality is not going to be particularly dramatic.

A safety phone could be a secret phone held by someone in a domestic abuse situation. They wouldn't want it discovered.

Every month? Isn't that super annoying?
What if there were a genuine emergency on the first Monday of the month? A lot of people would dismiss the alert assuming it's routine and not even read it. That's if they hadn't outright disabled the alert in the first place because of spam.