Do you know how "software engineers" can "help with COVID?" By getting into their cars and bringing supplies to elderly people in their neighborhood.
It is like volunteering to help out a soup kitchen. Sure, they could probably use some help with their website or other technical issues, but mostly they just need people to serve food.
When I shop for my groceries, I make sure to ask my elderly neighbours if they need anything. However, that's something a very large amount of the population can do. So I choose to spend the spare time I have applying my overall-rare skills where they can have the most impact, such as helping improve efficiency of testing in labs and remove technical speedbumps from hospital staff.
Anyone who wants to be a fucking moralist over this can quite frankly shut up, bunker up in their home and go back to wasting their quarantine watching Netflix and reading HN.
Even if you think the best thing to do is deliver supplies to the elderly, it makes no sense for a software engineer to stop what he or she is doing and do that. The entire restaurant and hospitality industry just got laid off; you should keep working and pay someone out-of-work to deliver supplies instead.