Who should I see a therapist or a psychiatrist

In regards to the question of "should I see a therapist or a psychiatrist" - possibly both.  I would want to know more about your history with anxiety and panic attacks- if you have always suffered from them, have you spoken to either kind of mental health professional about this previously?  A discussion with a professional may help you get some reliable information and answers to whatever your concerns might be about trying medication. 

It sounds as if therapy would be imperative for you- if this has been a lifelong struggle and is getting worse, you deserve some relief, some hope that you can live a life less constricted because of your anxiety . (Your suggestion that the pandemic played a role in the exacerbation of this for you is certainly correct, as well.)

Talking to someone about your experiences of anxiety and panic may help illuminate some important things for you- in particular, what kind of (possibly unconscious) fears, beliefs or assumptions might be driving the anxiety for you. These could have their origin in early life experiences or trauma you experienced at one time or another- things that you might be very aware of or may have completely forgotten about or minimized in your own mind. 

Think of it this way- anxiety does serve a purpose for us- it is a warning sign, something that tells us to be cautious because we may be under threat. When people have anxiety that seems to come out of nowhere, it has actually come from somewhere- probably from a time or place or circumstance where we genuinely did feel threatened and figured out a way-whether it was entirely effective or not- to protect ourselves. But later on- months or years later- we may still be using some of those protective behaviors when they are no longer useful or helpful and in fact are backfiring and causing more harm then good. We may not even realize that this is what we are doing. 

Talking openly with a therapist may help uncover some of the origins or motivations that fuel the anxiety and your response to it, and working together, you and your therapist can also start to apply cognitive and other therapeutic techniques- including self-monitoring, objective assessment of your habitual thought patterns (the "automatic" way we often think about things without being entirely aware of it)- and practicing a more open and flexible way of thinking about certain things in order to incrementally improve your own ability to assess the difference between genuine and imagined "threats".  The end result, hopefully, is someone with a wider range of tools to use in assessing situations realistically, an awareness of the areas in which they are more likely to struggle to do so -  and a much more embedded and confident sense of their own ability to retain conscious control of their emotional responses. And, because nothing is perfect, they will also know that if that control feels temporarily lost, they will be able to regain it in a much shorter period of time.